The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (PG-13)

Never has a film had so much potential and screwed itself so badly than this train wreck, “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.” As you can tell, I do not like this film. In fact I hate it with the wrath of a million boiling suns. This is how angry I became after watching this film. I can dislike a film for being poorly written or badly directed or just being kind of stupid. “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” is on a whole new level of hate, to the point where I felt dumber for watching the thing. The film is lazy, and if there is one thing I hate more than anything else, it is a lazy, patronising script.

The plot is actually quite good. Based off of Alan Moore’s graphic novels of the same name, The League is a group of famous characters from literature acting as a sort of 19^th Century ‘Avengers.’ The members include Allan Quartermain (Sean Connery) from King Solomon’s Mines, Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde (Jason Flemyng) from the eponymous novel, Captain Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah) of “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea” fame, Mina Harker (Peta Wilson) from “Dracula,” Rodney Skinner (Tony Curran), who plays an invisible man from “The Invisible Man,” Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend) from “The Picture Of Dorian Gray,” and finally an odd but — I think  smart — addition of Special Agent Tom Sawyer (Shane West). The actual plot follows The League as they stop a mysterious man known as ‘The Fantom,’ who is looking to throw the world into war with a series of ridiculous attacks on nations while putting on a bad accent. The League try and stop him as bad fight scenes ensue.

I watched the opening scene of this film, which sets up the main antagonist -pretty standard stuff for a superhero movie. By the time five minutes rolled around, however, I had half a page of questions that were not answered. By either major contrivances or huge glaring plot holes, this film makes absolutely no sense. By the time I’ve pointed out one problem, another one reared its ugly head. This affects the film in an extremely bad way. With a film like this, you have to focus a lot of attention on the characters, as it is a very character-driven piece. Ultimately that is the “The League’s” downfall, as I couldn’t care less about any of the characters. At the end of the film, I didn’t know a thing about them, despite all of them having literal novels by some of the world’s most famous authors written about them. The dialogue seems like it’s from a video-game cut-scene in two ways: one – it feels very clunky and doesn’t seem to fit and two – whenever Connery decided he didn’t want to shoot anymore scenes, they got a body double and a voice dub. It genuinely feels like I’m watching a bad video-game.

Speaking of Connery, he is really off his game in this. All of  his lines are said in the exact same tone ofvoice; and as amazing as that accent is, it gets frustrating during character development scenes such as his relationship with Tom Sawyer. Quartermain acts as a father figure to Sawyer and yet speaks to him as no more than an acquaintance. There are some big twists revealed throughout the film, with some of them actually being quite cool. It’s ruined by Connery’s acting, but is cool nonetheless. The final big criticism I have of this crap is the character of Mina Harker. She is a badass vampire woman who can kill people in a very brutal fashion. Hooray you might say, a good female character. Nope. They take a perfect heroin and make her into a love interest of a few characters and have her fall for some old tricks because she’s the token women character and that will fill the quota.

There are two things I liked about this movie: I liked the character of Tom Sawyer, but I don’t like how he was used, and I thought Flemyng’s performance was like finding a diamond under a steamy pile of excrement. That is it. Nothing more, nothing less. I swear I tried. Overall this movie was a complete train wreck except it is very easy to look away. In fact, I was pausing the movie to tweet to one of my fellow critics while watching this because frankly, I would much rather be in his company than have to suffer this. A really bad film if I haven’t made it clear already.

– by Paul O’Connor