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Does the new ‘Green Lantern’ trailer actually hurt the movie’s advance word?

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It worked for “Iron Man,” but will the superhero-as-wisecracking-free-spirit turn the same trick for “Green Lantern”?

The trailer for the Martin Campbell-directed summer movie about the DC Comics character -- long believed the better of the two upcoming ‘Green’ superhero films-- starts with Ryan Reynolds as a cad who doesn’t give a fig. But Reynolds, sadly, isn’t Robert Downey, Jr., and the scene lacks the panache displayed by the man in the iron suit.

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The trailer doesn’t get much better from there as it shows the transformation of Reynolds’ Hal Jordan into a man of great powers, all in a swirl of greenlit earnestness.

Questionable trailers don’t always presage bad movies. But teasers are supposed to get people more excited, and this one, well, doesn’t exactly get us excited. (Judging by the reaction of many of the fan sites, which didn’t like the absence of mythology in favor of the Reynolds-ishness of it, we were hardly alone in feeling that way.) Given how much anticipation surrounds this movie, it almost makes you wonder if a more mysterious trailer -- or none at all -- would have done more for the film than what the studio put out.

--Steven Zeitchik

twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

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