24. Green Lantern

Release date: June 17, 2011
Director: Martin Campbell
Stars: Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard, Mark Strong, Angela Bassett, Tim Robbins, Geoffrey Rush, Michael Clarke Duncan

You can’t blame DC Comics for trying. Heading into summer of 2011, superhero cinema was looking to be in strong shape. Over at Marvel, the film wizards were prepping to unveil Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, and, unrelated to this year’s The Avengers, X-Men: First Class, all of which proved to be both financially successful and artistically satisfactory. The brass at DC, on the other hand, were most likely shitting bricks over the discontented reactions over the impending disaster known as Green Lantern.

And once the masses witnessed director Martin Campbell’s all-around botched final product, the bad vibes only intensified. So what exactly went wrong? For starters, the film’s script is an incoherent mess, mishandling the villain (Peter Sarsgaard’s mutated Hector Hammond), turning Blake Lively’s love interest character into a caricature, and relying too heavily upon Ryan Reynolds’ patented, and tired, too-cool-for-school shtick.

What the filmmakers did harp on, though, were all of Green Lantern’s pricey visual effects, yet even those don’t cut it. Often looking more like a video game than a movie, Campbell’s misfire overcompensates for its hardly-there story with overly stylized FX, resulting in a lifeless CGI reel. One can imagine DC employees telling each other, after hearing the pans from fanboys and critics alike, “Well, at least we’re only a year away from The Dark Knight Rises.”