This is not the Green Lantern movie its fans have waited to see. Positioned in what is deemed as the “safe zone” between the surprisingly stellar X-Men: First Class and the anticipated release of Captain America, the movie should be able to hold its own on box office returns, but it could have and should have been so much better. In what can only be described as a Michael Bay lite latte, Green Lantern suffers from being too familiar, too serious, and way too flat.

Green Lantern, as a superhero, can be compared to Marvel’s Captain America, for both are a product of 1940s American strong-jawed and equally strong-willed thought.  He’s a space-age hero, an intergalactic super cop but part of a larger army all sworn to protect their sector from the evil beings that crawl out of space and the final frontier.  His villains are simple-minded and aided by the color yellow. Green Lantern, especially when Hal Jordan was introduced, was supposed to be a part of the burgeoning science fiction genre. Unfortunately, this movie largely decides to jettison the simple fact of Americana and the series’ wider space opera aspects and to present its audience with a grounded hero, a pretty vapid heroine, and an under-developed villain -- all with pseudo-chic daddy issues.

Through the years, many different people have taken the Green Lantern oath.  The most notable however is Hal Jordan who made his comic book debut in 1959.  In filmmaker Martin Campbell’s Green Lantern – which borrows the new-and-improved origin story from 2004, Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) is a second-generation pilot and total hotshot self-confessed degenerate. Muscular, fit, but simply afraid, Jordan has found his niche in life as a ladies man and sometime uncle to his brother’s kids. It’s a comfortable, selfish and unchallenging niche.

Long-time off-and-on-again love interest Carol Ferris (Blake Lively) is at a loss for what might change the broken parts inside Hal.  She’s worried that his flyboy antics are spiralling out of control and, when he wrecks a fighter jet in a near-death accident and just shrugs it off, Carol knows that something from his past -- his father’s haunting death -- is eating away at him once again. She can’t save him, though.  No human can touch this emotionally unavailable man.

Leave it to the cosmos to do the fixing. A fatally wounded member of the Green Lantern corps, Abin Sur (Temuera Morrison), crash lands on earth and allows the ring to choose its next owner. The green power summons Jordan and, quite literally, whisks him away into a space-aged world of good greens and evil yellows. Suspiciously eyed by Sinestro (Mark Strong, looking very much like a mutated David Niven) and bone-crushingly trained by Kilowog (voiced by Michael Clarke Duncan), Hal discovers that his world and his entire universe has just been expanded by an all-too brief trip to the planet Oa.

Back on earth, Dr. Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard, one of the film’s only bright spots, although he’s underused) has been exposed to the yellow liquid that caused Abin Sur’s death (after conducting the alien’s autopsy and now experiencing some mind-altering abilities of his own). Soon enough, the fates will see to it that Green Lantern and Hammond meet as they duke it out for Carol’s hand while a growing force, Parallax, threatens to destroy earth.

Yawn. Written by Greg Berlanti, Michael Green, Marc Guggenheim, and Michael Goldenberg, Green Lantern comes across light as a feather and so very familiar in function that it never completely gets off the ground. The film’s halved components, one part on earth and the other in space, feel supremely truncated by an earth-bound story  too uncomplicated for its own good. The science fiction element gets about ten minutes of redundant and grossly unimaginative play (it’s essentially a training montage for heaven’s sake) and the awesome Green Lantern universe never feels fully explored or even satisfactorily introduced. We are earth-bound all too soon and the movie suffers in a very choppy manner.

The CGI suit is NOT the problem here. Throughout the film, there are some super stellar 3D effects and -- especially when the fight between Green Lantern and Parallax goes into space -- they shimmy and shake with the best moments from the comic.  All those fanboys who got their whitey-tighties in a tender tuff because of the released footage can sleep soundly now.  It -- every typed word of your annoying talkback -- was all for nothing. The CGI looks fairly phenomenal and replicates the world of the comic faithfully and lively.

But the human part -- because it’s played too straight without an element of camp -- doesn’t work.  We get a hint of what could have been if played as the Flash Gordon it really is when Hal visits Carol as Green Lantern. At first, she doesn’t recognize him…because of his mask…and then she understands (which all females never do in these comic books) and the two of them banter in a very funny exchange about not recognizing someone because of a strip of color around their eyes or wearing a mask…a curse of logic that plagues all superheroes. The audience laughs. They get this. It’s a shining moment of the film -- a missed opportunity.

An apology to his loyal fan base for this next comment, but Green Lantern is a second-tier superhero and, as imagined by this bunch of Hollywood do-gooders, doesn’t deserve the sequel hinted at by the end-credits scene. The Golden-Aged character is much better than what this Silver-Aged inspired movie delivers. Perhaps this can be corrected with a Part Two, but because a whopping $300 million is at stake (that’s counting marketing, too), the filmmakers and studio really should have gotten the lava lamp mood of Green Lantern right from the very beginning.

(Released by Warner Bros. Pictures and rated “PG-13” by MPAA.)

Review also posted at www.franksreelreviews.com.