LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Stepping into the breach Friday is Green Lantern, starring Ryan Reynolds as the ring-wielding intergalactic space cop immortalized in D.C. comic books. The $150 million Warner Bros. picture tells the story of Earths first member of the Green Lantern Corps and his maiden task to beat back and defeat mega-villain Parallax, a planet-killing entity that thrives on fear. Blake Lively co-stars as his love interest, while Peter Sarsgaard and Mark Strong are on board as villains. The films director, Martin Campbell, who rebooted the James Bond franchise with the gritty Casino Royale, acknowledges that the Green Lantern is a lesser-known member of the D.C. comics pantheon, but so what? We had a little bit more work to do, Campbell told reporters recently. It wasnt in as many peoples consciousness as Superman or Batman may have been. But Iron Man was a second-tier (Marvel comics) character that turned out very well, he points out. Whether a superhero is second-tier or first-tier is irrelevant ... The movie has to stand alone. Early Green Lantern reviews were overwhelmingly negative. The New York Observer said the film was a dumb, pointless, ugly, moronic and incomprehensible jumble of botched effects, technical blunders and cluttered chaos. Variety said the visually lavish sci-fi adventure was a highly unstable alloy of the serious, the goofy and the downright derivative. Still, bullish sources at Warner Bros. expect the film to gross at least $50m during its first three days of release in the United States and Canada. That would put it in the same range as X-Men: First Class, which opened to $55m earlier this month and has grossed $104m to date. The critics were generally kind to Reynolds, who was last seen by a handful of people trying to escape a coffin in Buried. He seemed a natural choice to play a character less riven by internal demons than recent movie superheroes have tended to be.