The chances of Ryan Reynolds playing a role where he is smug and/or arrogant are approximately the same as the chances that adding cheese to something will make it better.

That is infinite, by the way. An infinite percent chance. And I don't want to hear about how Reynolds was a total fraud in Adventureland or how dumping a trash can full of cheese curds into your hot tub does little if anything to improve the experience. That's an example of too little cheese. Try filling the whole tub next time. You can thank me later.

I'm not complaining about Reynolds, exactly, but it's been nice to see him actually try some different roles recently. I wasn't exactly excited for the Green Lantern and couldn't even talk anyone into going with me (I should probably use the threat of violence next time). It didn't help, then, that Reynolds was right back to doing his same old charmingly arrogant thing.

-- Local show times, theaters, trailer.

Long ago, the immortal Guardians created a corps of warriors known as the Green Lanterns to protect the universe. But their worst enemy, a planet-consuming force known as Parallax, has escaped its imprisonment--and mortally wounded their finest warrior, Temuera Morrison.

As he dies, he travels to nearby Earth, where his green ring passes its power on to test pilot Ryan Reynolds. Reynolds is human, inexperienced, and self-doubting, but he may hold the key to stopping Parallax from destroying everything they know.

Okay, so there's kind of a big story here. I didn't even mention the subplot with the mad scientist or Reynolds' ex who's also his boss. This story is the size of Jay Leno's garage. (Unless Leno is one of those guys who lets his cars run free-range. I'm a little too busy trying to establish negotiations with the colony of ants in my bathroom to keep up with the storage habits of celebrities.) You've got a big ol' crazy alien-filled universe with its own brand of magic to establish, a superhero origin story to provide, and not one but two supervillains to whip up.

Not that this is that far removed from what most other superhero movies have to accomplish, but it feels more burdensome for Green Lantern. Possibly that's because there's a lot of exposition. If you got billed for consuming exposition the same way you did for electricity, your exposition bill the month after watching Green Lantern would force you to rob a liquor store.

Despite that, all the rules about how the powers of the Lanterns and Parallax work are vaguely unclear. If you're already steeped in the comics, you may have a better grasp of the mechanics, but you are also horribly lonely, so there's that. Without a clear understanding of the powers' rules, the stakes are dropped, made worse by the fact so much of what's happening in the bigger picture takes place offscreen. Green Lantern has four writers. Just making a note.

Meanwhile, Reynolds' character is an archetype older than the stuff Julius Caesar kept in his attic: an irresponsible, cocky, loose-cannon pilot with a sweet car and intimacy problems. He gets to do some actual acting in the third act, and in retrospect his character makes perfect sense, but it still makes him boring, the kind of guy you want to punch or sigh at, depending on how much energy you have that day.

Director Martin Campbell does throw in some creative moments in Reynolds' fight scenes. When he's not busy hoarding the world's collection of A's, Peter Sarsgaard turns in a nice performance as the non-Parallax bad guy (also Parallax is pretty cool). It all sort of just barely works, but it's pretty dim stuff compared to the upper tiers of the superhero pantheon.

Grade: C

* Contact Ed Robertson at edwrobertson@gmail.com. His fiction is available on Kindle, Nook, and through Smashwords.