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Green Lantern is probably the single-most generic superhero movie I’ve ever seen. It’s not terrible so much as it is wholly unremarkable. It’s mired in a scatter-shot script that dwells on plot points and secondary characters I couldn’t give two craps about, when all that screen time should have been devoted to making me care about the title character. Ryan Reynolds is plenty charismatic to hit a home run with this sort of thing, but the movie simply doesn’t give him time to breathe. And when it does, it’s in an insipid B-line love story that’s so limp you have to cringe. Director Martin Campbell whisks us from one scene to another without the slightest amount of grace or any sense of rising action. It’s a discombobulating ride.

And a silly one, too. Maybe the source material has always been silly, but if I understand the Green Lantern’s powers correctly — um, he can literally do anything? First of all, how do you create drama when your character can do anything he can imagine? And second of all, if a helicopter is crashing, why would he imagine giving it wheels and have it slide around on an imagined race car track? I mean, that’s silly, right?

The one thing this movie could have had going for it was sex appeal. Ryan Reynolds was practically naked when he performed the part on-set, and then the visual effects wizards digitally painted his costume on in post-production. Somehow, even the sex appeal of the main character got lost in translation. And just about everything else in this movie is too ugly to look at. We get fish-faced aliens, purple people, and a bunch of terrible looking 1960s Star Trek rejects — not to mention a melon-headed Peter Sarsgaard as the main villain, looking so much like Eric Stoltz from 1985’s Mask as to make me shudder.

There’s five to ten minutes of narration telling you shit you don’t need to know, there’s the obligatory training montage, the obligatory sad flashback to make you feel sorry for the hero, the obligatory joy of discovering one’s newfound magical abilities, the obligatory girlfriend subplot, the obligatory jealous peer-turned-villain, the obligatory act three threat against a major city… you name it, Green Lantern has thrown it into the blender. But without one ounce of soul, character, humor, or fun.

With Blake Lively, Tim Robbins and Angela Bassett.