Green Lantern: Is It REALLY That Bad?

Last Updated on August 21, 2024

Deadpool & Wolverine has topped the box office for the last month. It’s the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time, both domestically and internationally, and the reviews and audience reaction have been top-shelf all around. Yet, as everyone who knows anything about superhero movies knows, Ryan Reynolds had a few hiccups before making it into the big time with the Deadpool franchise. There was X-Men: Origins – Wolverine, in which he played The Merc With a Mouth (or, in this case, without a mouth) for the first time, but an even bigger disaster was his time as Hal Jordan in Green Lantern. 

The year was 2011, and at the time Green Lantern was considered one of the hottest properties in the business. Every up-and-coming actor of the era, including Bradley Cooper, Jared Leto and even Justin Timberlake coveted that role. Ryan Reynolds nabbed it, but it proved to be a mixed blessing. Yes, the movie was a giant, embarrassing flop which arguably set Reynolds’s career back several years, but it certainly wasn’t all bad. How so? Well, Reynolds met the love of his life, Blake Lively, on set, and over a decade later the two are still together. So even if it was a disaster, I bet Reynolds is still happy he did it. The career consequences probably were more dire for director Martin Campbell, who’s since stayed away from movies of this size (although he did direct one of the most underrated Jackie Chan movies ever – The Foreigner). 

But, is it really all that bad? In this video by our DC superfan Paul Bookstabler, we take a deep dive into this much-mocked (including by Reynolds himself) superhero epic, pointing out some of the things people have forgotten, such as the fact that it sports an early role for Taika Waititi. Is there anything else about it that’s any good? Well, let’s take a deep dive, shall we?