Metacritic reviews

Serves up all the requisite elements with enough self-deprecating humor to suggest it doesn't take itself too seriously.

An attempt to infuse an earnest piece of comicbook lore with an irreverent, tongue-in-cheek sensibility yields decidedly mixed results in Green Lantern.

Reynolds makes Hal a perfectly functional comic-book hero, but there's a big difference between functional and super.

Martin Campbell, though a capable director of action (Hal's training session with the Michael Clarke Duncan-voiced Kilowog is proof of that), doesn't have a poet's instincts.

Whenever this Lantern returns to terra firma (too often), its imaginative flights are ground down under the Warners overlords' demographic-pandering heels.

The film never rewards the viewer for even trying to keep track of what is going on. So you give up, and instead try to grab on to the small pleasures, which momentarily distract from the fact that the narrative is nonsensical, the characters so boilerplate that their every action seem preordained from the earliest frames, even as the action on-screen is often incoherent.

The film, released in both 2D and 3D, delivers lots of freshly minted CGI'd action (eventually) but none of it grabs you. There's just something too synthetic about the whole enterprise - it's fantasy tipped over into fakery.

Well, Green Lantern isn't "Jonah Hex" bad. But it's silly enough to be part of the same "silliest Warner Brothers comic book summer movies of all time" conversation.

Even as a prime example of rotten summer silliness, this is a paralyzing experience.

The tone is all over the place, which makes the movie difficult to take neither seriously nor as popcorn fluff.