2011's Green Lantern has long been held up as an evolutionary cul-de-sac in the superhero genre; a CGI-slathered waste of the time and energy of a staggering number of talented people, including respected action director Martin Campbell, talented performers like Blake Lively, Geoffrey Rush, Mark Strong, and Clancy Brown, and especially star Ryan Reynolds, who’s made the film a running punchline in his Deadpool series of far-more-successful comic-book-based films.
Now, Reynolds has revealed that—like so many American comic book fans in June 2011—he’s never even seen the completed film all the way through. The actor tried to deploy some very un-Wade-Wilson-esque diplomacy when EW asked him about the film, but admitted that he only ever watched a nearly-finished cut of the movie (and has never gone back to correct the cinematic gap). “I’ve got to be really careful how I answer this,” Reynolds said when asked at his numerous digs at the film. “Look, I’ve never seen the full final version of Green Lantern. I saw a very late stage rough cut of the film. Now, that isn’t to say that I didn’t want to see it because I didn’t like it. I have movies that have been received pretty well that I haven’t seen, and then I have movies that I have seen 100 times that people don’t like but I just like.”
Reynolds went on to attempt to make it super-clear that his mockery of the movie is all about poking fun at himself, not his co-stars or collaborators and that, even if he was, it was Deadpool making the joke, not him. “It’s me just taking the piss out of me, but it’s more Wade though,” he clarified, introducing the slightly worrying topic of what else “Wade” might make him say or do next. (Not make any more Green Lantern films, is our hope.)