The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Side Order of Snark
Hello! My name is Curtis Edmonds, and I’ll be your movie reviewer tonight. Our entree this evening is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, served with an appetizer of contempt, a side order of snark, and a heaping pile of sarcasm for dessert. Our special will be served in several courses, as follows:
The Part of the Review Where I Give You A General Idea of What The Movie Is About
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is not so much a movie but a fossil assemblage. It operates in an overheated World-As-Myth where all the characters from late-Victorian adventure classics still walk the earth, at least in Cliff’s Notes form, and do good. Of course, there aren’t really all that many of them around, not that modern movie audiences would recognize, so the movie has to explain who all of them are and what all of them are doing and suchlike. You have Allan Quartermain (King Solomon’s Mines) summoned from Kenya, Captain Nemo (20,000 Leagues Under The Sea) and his pirate submarine Nautilus dispatched from the inky depths, Mina Harker (Dracula) recalled from Transylvania, the Invisible Man (oh, forget it), Dorian Grey (The Picture of Dorian Grey) wrenched out of his London drawing-room, and, for some reason, Tom Sawyer gets dragged into all this nonsense.
(Never mind that this particular fossil assemblage couldn’t possibly exist — Tom Sawyer, for example, would be in his early fifties in the movie’s 1899 timeline — you’ll have to suspend a lot more disbelief than that before you’re done.)
The Part of the Review Where I Mention That The Movie Was Based On A Comic Book
If you’re about the same age as I am, and this reminds you of anything, well, it should. The two things I always watched on Saturday mornings when I was a kid, in between the cereal commercials, over my bowl of Froot Loops, was the old Warner Brothers cartoons on ABC, and the Justice League cartoons that were either before or after them, I can’t remember. The Justice League was Batman and Superman and Wonder Woman and Aquaman, with other politically-correct characters like Black Thunder and Big Chief and what-have-you. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is just the 1899 version of the Justice League. And naturally, like just about every other movie these days, it’s based on a comic book. (”Graphic novel”, whatever.)
I don’t read comic books, or at least I haven’t since I got caught reading an Iron Man comic in fifth grade when I should have been studying fractions. (I still can’t tell you the difference between a numerator and a denominator.) Comic books have their place in the world, and I have mine (lying on the sofa with a Dr Pepper and a can of honey-roasted peanuts, dozing off to the Falcons game). Comic books only intersect my world when they show up as movies. And outside of the truly inspired efforts (Spider-Man, Road To Perdition), I wish they’d stay away. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is more-or-less why.
The Part of the Review Where I Complain That the Movie Doesn’t Make a Lick of Sense
Most of the ground here has been covered by Roger Ebert’s review, which points out the manifest sillinesses of the movie’s detour through Venice. He’s been to Venice, I haven’t, so I can’t comment here except to say that he’s absolutely right, of course. However, I have read the remarkable Memoirs of an Invisible Man by the brilliant H.F. Saint, which gives you all the rules for being invisible if you should ever to happen to become so yourself. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen follows this rulebook fairly well (except for some scenes where its Invisible Man shows up as a bald albino for lack of CGI funding) during the scenes where he’s on screen. And yet, we’re asked to believe that the Invisible Man could be a stowaway on what amounts to a two-man escape pod on a voyage from Venice to Mongolia, without anyone bumping his elbow, or seeing him after he’s eaten, or hearing him cough or talk in his sleep or anything like that, just because, you know, they can’t see him and stuff. (Which they would, eventually, if he got spinach in his teeth.)
This is minor, a little nitpicky point. But there are, no kidding, hundreds of these little nitpicky points, spread all throughout the movie, one on top of the other. You could choke on any one of them just as easily as you could choke on any one of your popcorn kernels. What’s the vampire doing out on the deck of the submarine in broad daylight? you’ll ask yourself, and from that moment on, there isn’t any way to enjoy the movie.
The Part of the Review Where I Condemn the Director, Screenwriter, Producers, and Their Flacks, Sycophants, and To a Life of Eternal Shame, Suffering, and Ignominy
Why is this the case? I don’t have a good reason for this, but this is what I am thinking. Everyone is used to having Hollywood condescend to our intelligence, asking us to believe that — let’s look at just this year, shall we — that you can steal three tons of gold in three Mini Coopers and drive them through Los Angeles without once stopping for gas or new shocks (The Italian Job), Adam Sandler is such a big Yankees fan that he would turn away a beautiful and wanton Heather Graham because she was wearing a Red Sox bra-and-panties set (Anger Management), or Keanu Reeves actually has an IQ over room temperature (The Matrix Reloaded). Everyone is used to having this kind of thing happen. But it’s not that often that you can pick out hundreds of plot points in a movie and say to yourself, “Dear God, the people who made this movie must have a lower IQ than Keanu Reeves.” For once, the contempt that Hollywood has for its audience is reciprocated, with interest.
What makes The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen so horrible, so bad, so putrid is that nobody involved with the movie seems to have realized certain basic rules of moviemaking, such as the need to have a plot and interesting characters and situations and stuff. Instead, the thinking seems to have been that average CGI effects and casual Connery one-liners would be enough to get the summertime audience in the door. So basically, you have director Stephen Norrington (who, by trade, is a makeup artist, and it shows, really it does) directing a bad movie. You have screenwriter James Robinson (in his first effort, and who seems to have his head jammed totally up his ass) writing a bad movie. You have Lucinda Syson (who cast Swept Away, which tells you all you need to know) and Donna Isaacson (who cast Miller’s Crossing and should know better) casting a bad movie. You even have Sean Connery (about whom more later) and others producing a bad movie. In short, you have a whole Rogue’s Gallery of moviemakers who, from their efforts, would seem to have been doing nothing for the past year except making a movie so bad that it defies the limits of the thesaurus to describe it. And yet, they have not been publicly named and shamed, they have not been ousted from the profession, they have not been chased down the street by an angry, outraged crowd. Why I can’t imagine. Everyone in this movie, everyone from director Stephen Norrington to second assistant accountant Michele Wright, should be barred from ever making another movie until they write “I will not make bad movies ever again” on the blackboard a thousand times.
The Part of the Review Where I Give Sean Connery His Due Honor and Respect For Just Being Who He Is
And yet, there is Sean Connery, who for all of his swagger and bluster and ham-handed scene stealing, is still a wonderful actor, can still carry even the worst movie, can save the weakest scene, can spout even the worst, most nonsensical dialogue. Even in incredibly stupid scenes (like the one where he plays staredown with one of Siegfried and Roy’s tigers) he has a commanding presence. That Connery as an actor cannot redeem the utter failure of Connery as a producer is not entirely his fault; he is certainly doing the best he can, and he keeps The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen from being quite as bad as, say, Gods and Generals.
The Part of the Review Where I Recapitulate How Bad the Movie Actually Is, and Refer Back to the First Paragraph of the Review to Kind of Bring Everything Full Circle
But The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is still a bad movie. Bad bad bad bad bad. Not “so bad it’s good”, either. Just plain bad. This is Mystery Science Theater 3000 bad. If it were any worse, it would be proscribed by the Geneva Convention so that it couldn’t be used to torture terrorists.
My advice to you is to order anything else on the menu. Hell, order off the menu. Or go to another restaurant. And, hey! HEY! Don’t forget to leave a tip, willya?