Despite a few flickers of promise, Green Lantern burns out

Green Lantern
Two stars
Opens today everywhere
Warner Brothers, which owns DC Comics, has a problem. They own 75 years’ worth of DC Comics characters, but only Superman and Batman have proved capable of headlining multimillion-dollar franchises in the past decade, while arch-rival Marvel Comics has figured out how to monetize the lesser-known-likes of Iron Man and Thor. Their solution to this, along with the inevitable demise of the Harry Potter franchise, is Green Lantern, an action figure-friendly fusion of Spider-Man and Star Wars that isn’t as dire as some early reviews have claimed, but suffers from a few too many cooks stirring the (pea-green) soup.