Green Lantern is based off the DC Universe comic book of the same name. Again, I have some knowledge of the source material. However, I like to judge a movie by its own merits. I won't be holding any fanboy geekdom against anything here.

Directed by Martin Campbell (Casino Royale, The Mask of Zorro), Lantern is in hands that I'd like to call capable, but...

Yeah, "capable" works. And hopefully I can make it through life without ever having to type the name "Martin Campbell" again.

Speaking of names I'd like to never mention again, how about Blake Lively (Gossip Girl, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants)? Here she plays the forced love-interest who also happens to be a business-woman of intelligent acumen and a trained fighter-pilot. She fails to convince us of any of her roles, including someone Ryan Reynolds would fall in love with.

But I digress.

Reynolds plays Hal Jordan—womanizer, irresponsible and skilled pilot. This is convincing. Mr. Reynolds is talented and likable. His casting is spot on. He sleeps around, chugs his booze and manages to get into the cock-pit and kick some ass. Anybody familiar with Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff can tell you this is an accurate representation of fighter-pilots. The "Lantern" part comes when a dying alien gives Hal his "power-ring." He is initiated into the order of The Green Lanterns. For those unfamiliar, they are basically super-awesome space-cops. The rings manifest willpower into physical reality. It's all very comic-booky, and I love it.

So Reynolds works. What else? The effects. Green Lantern boasts some of the finest CGI I've seen since Avatar. The opening sequence is pitch-perfect (if not a little loud). We meet aliens and foreign worlds and a creature called Parallax who is scary as hell. There is a fighter-plane sequence and giant-toy-car (yes) that both looked more like a video-game, but other than that, when we travel to space the graphics are spectacular. I can imagine some people will be bothered by Reynold's costume. It moves and flows with energy. Sometimes our eyes are attracted to his chest when we should be looking at other things on screen. My graphic designer friends are going to have a shit-fit.

About that Parallax thing, despite its PG-13 rating, Green Lantern has some quite disturbing moments. Thirteen is about the right age here for sure. I won't be showing this one to my three-year-old son, even though Spiderman 2 is one of his favorites. Seriously, Lantern displays some creepy shit.

Which leads us to:

Peter Sarsgaard (Garden State, Knight and Day) as Hector Hammond. Sarsgaard is the standout performance of Green Lantern. Usually a pretty handsome guy, he plays creepy and repulsive in this flick. He is a scientist who begins to mutate after contact with an alien life-form. His nervous tics, dialogue delivery and eventual evil screaming all work wonders. Even if his character arc was presented as forced and confusing, Sarsgaard did his job.

Okay, so Reynolds become a space-cop. Big evils show up. Angela Basset and Tim Robbins show up. I haven't really mentioned it yet, but Green Lantern doesn't work. It is an atrocious as a movie. The editing is insane. Every tender moment has the proverbial tin-eared dialogue with guitar twangs. I'm not kidding. It used the old 1980's cliché of Lethal Weapon-ish guitars.

Green Lantern feels like a patchwork quilt designed by Hollywood executives who couldn't agree with each other. It is your basic origin story. It's too bad to. The cosmic stuff and alien characters are promising, well-delivered and cool looking. The final confrontation with Parallax has some genuinely exciting moments. Yet, whenever we head back to Earth for drama, the audience is bored.

I say cut twenty minutes from this bad-boy. Get rid of the love scenes and the god-awful helicopter sequence (you'll see)—and you've got yourself a pretty cool movie.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1133985/