It’s fair to say that Ryan Reynolds’ career has been a mixed bag. Sure he’s hit his stride in recent years with Deadpool and Free Guy, but life wasn’t always so easy for People magazine’s sexiest man of the year, 2010. If there was a low point of his career, though, it had to be 2011’s Green Lantern film, an action movie so bad Reynolds has spent the last decade lampooning it.
There are plenty of reasons Green Lantern doesn’t work. To list but a few, it completely wastes Reynolds’ natural charm, has too many villains, and a script so weak you could legally serve it to minors at a pub. This isn’t just my opinion either. Green Lantern landed like a wet fart when it was released, underperforming at the box office, and it was skewered by critics who called out its wafter thin story, dodgy CGI, and derivative plot.
Yet, for some reason, the film is enjoying something of a renaissance on streaming. Green Lantern is currently the number 2 movie on Netflix in America and the number 4 piece of content across the whole streaming service. That means it’s outperforming a lot of good films, and it poses the question. Why?
Now it could be that the entire country has got into self-flagellation, or maybe they’re experimenting with masochism? We don’t know. Perhaps a younger generation of Reynolds fans (Reynoldites? Ry-Fan Reynoldses? We’ll work out a name later) have just seen Free Guy and are now enjoying the rest of his filmography? Whatever the reason, someone needs to step in and put a stop to this.
The man most likely to step up, in this case, is probably Reynolds himself. He’s spent the last ten years apologising for Green Lantern. He made fun of the CGI suit in the Deadpool trailer, he killed himself in Deadpool 2 before he could make the film, and once described the movie as “The Darkest Crease In The Anus Of The Universe.”
Unfortunately, he’s not commented on the film’s newfound popularity yet. But if we know Reynolds (and we don’t), it won’t be long before he says something about this disastrous DCEU movie.