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Resoundingly
Adequate… well, decently adequate at any rate:
The League of Extraordinary Gentleman
by Christian De Matteo
WIMPY
I knew from the get-go, that I should watch this movie,
one I’d held off on watching for quite some time, with the
brilliant Alan Moore comic series far from my mind.
I knew I should watch it as its own film, its own story,
and not make constant comparisons.
But how can one do that truly when the onscreen version
some completely lacks all that made the source material astounding.
The Sean Connery produced “action” flick, directed by
Blade director Steven Norrington, has too many faults to list
all of. At a glance
it seems very promising: neat characters in a neat setup with
explosions a’plenty.
But therein lies problem number 1.
I can’t quite put my finger on it, but Norrington,
somehow, manages to direct the most visually busy and explosive
action scenes ever… and have them bore the living crap out of
me. Something is
missing. Something
big. The interest
factor is what it must be.
To this day, huge Blade fan that I am, I can’t watch
the first film when tired… because the actions scenes play
like visual lullabies for me and before I know it I’m dreaming
deeply of little vampires jumping over fences.
LXG has the same problem.
During what should have been a deeply engaging gunfight
in Dorian Gray’s library, I began to nod off, waking up to bad
guys falling from high staircases and Tom Sawyer popping off
round after round. And
I didn’t care.
Later still, when Nemo’s submarine is sinking and all
the main characters lives are in danger and Mr. Hyde must do
something drastic and possibly suicidal to save them… I fell
into a completely peaceful and deep slumber.
I finished the second half of the film an hour and half
later. And still
felt tired.
Problem number 2 is that Norrington and screenwriter
James Robinson manage to suck more soul out of the League
than Michael Bolton sucked out of “When a Man Loves a
Woman.” With the
exception of Dorian Gray (though not a character in the comic,
the best one in the film) and the Invisible Man, the characters
are all two-dimensional clichés, none of whom you care about at
all or are interesting at all, despite any BS abilities they
have that should probably be cool.
I digress, but not really, for one moment:
**********
Why The
League of Extraordinary Gentleman is one of the best series
ever written.
by Christian De Matteo
Because Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill researched fully
and took classic English literary characters out their
novels and placed them in the classic comic book superhero team
template and sent them out to deal with very mid-century English
adventures all the while making the characters, though bizarre
and gifted, very, very human.
Mena Harker (the FEMALE LEADER of the League – see,
folks, this is called literary irony) is haunted and, as any
good Victorian woman would be, secretly ashamed of her dealing
with Dracula and stoically leads the team all the while
exemplifying female decorum simultaneously with masculine
leading ability. In
other words, this complete lady don’t take no crap from no
one.
Allan Quartermain… is a freaking opium addict!!!! Before they’re able to take him out in the field, they have
to dry him out. Years
of adventuring and living among the natives has taken his toll
on him and he’s sunk into depression and a drug addled haze.
He still has his famed adventurer ability but he does it
all with a monkey on his back and a cranky English old man
attitude. Perfect.
The Invisible Man is a criminal pervert that you just
have to love. They
meet him on a case where a Catholic girls school has fallen prey
to a series of unprecedented Immaculate Conceptions, where the
girls fly up in the air and are taken by what is apparently the
Holy Spirit. Except
it’s not. It’s
the Invisible Man doing what most teenage boys would do if they
too got invisibility powers.
The stories are fun, engaging, chock full of crafty
humor, the intelligence of their literary forebearers and
visually stunning. The
culminating adventure in Volume One takes place in a huge
Chinatown section of slum England where a huge contraption
raises out of the street knocking down buildings.
**********
And now back to our LXG review.
It has none of these great qualities of the comic book
and – if one were to stick to their guns and view it as its
own entity and not as the comic- nothing of its own to bring to
the table. Sean
Connery, obviously wanting to be the beefy hero since he lost
the role of Gandalf (thankfully) completely jettisons the whole
Opium thing and makes Quartermain your average, run-of-the-mill
English adventurer, about as exciting as tea crumpets served at
precisely the proper time.
Mena Harker… turns into a vampire repeatedly and loses
all semblance of Lady-hood, decorum, and might I add,
attractiveness. Oh…
and she’s not the leader.
Our boy Bond is.
The film suffers from Star Trek one syndrome, so enamored
of its own special effects that it spends minutes at a times
focusing on Nemo’s shipping cutting through the water when
mere seconds would have done, and Hyde, focused on repeatedly
looks like a small child did the special effects with bleary
watercolor and bad pencil outlining.
What saves this from the infamous PATHETIC rating is that
parts are slightly engaging, the actions scenes are decently
shot, Dorian Gray and the Invisible Man are fun and… no
wait… that’s it.
The movie is best described as your grandmother’s
meatloaf. When you finish it, you’re full and kind of satisfied, but
have a bad taste in your mouth, and you kind of wish you’d
ordered Chinese instead.
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