Endangered loved ones are a common trope of action cinema, but let's be honest here: We've seen it so often that it's clichéd and lazy. 'Spider-Man,' 'The Dark Knight,' 'Iron Man' and plenty of others have all had scenes where the hero's love interest or lady friend gets in trouble and needs to be rescued. It's usually followed by a scene where she shows that she is just as capable as the hero, either by attacking the villain or by performing some other action to make up for being kidnapped. 'Green Lantern' features a scene where Blake Lively, as Carol Ferris, gets kidnapped and used against Green Lantern. It goes exactly how you would expect: The hero frees her, drops a quick quip, and later needs her help.
The problem is that these scenes are always, always predictable. She isn't going to die, because then the hero is a failure and the movie is depressing. So, if it's perfectly predictable, the five or 10 minutes spent on revealing how much danger the female lead is in is essentially wasted. The audience doesn't learn anything new. The most we can hope for is a neat bit of action. These days, that just isn't enough.
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If you've ever seen a movie before in your entire life, this won't come as much surprise. There are moments when Green Lantern loses faith in himself and has to be talked into being a hero. It's the same as every other action movie, and perhaps most reminiscent of 'Batman Begins.' ...It would be nice, for once, to be able to point and go, "See? Look, our hero has learned something because he did _______," rather than watching someone explain how the hero always knew what he had to learn.
The movie suffered in part because there was too little going on with the plot.
