Grade:  D

Director:  Stephen Norrington		Released:  July 2003
Writer:  James Robinson, from Alan Moore's comic		MPAA Rating:  PG-13
Players:  Sean Connery		Running time:  110 minutes

Ratings System

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen begins interestingly.  Then the story goes nowhere.  The assembly of the team - or "league" - eats up the first hour, which leaves under 45 minutes to tell the rest of the tale.  Maddeningly, it is just after the last team member joins when the story gets stuck in neutral.  At the juncture of the film when you expect the really interesting stuff to kick in is when the boring stuff kicks in.  It substitutes action for story.

Speaking of the last team member, that would be Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde.  In his Mr. Hyde form he looks very silly indeed.  The silliest looking creature I've seen in a movie since the Scorpion King in The Mummy Returns.  That honor was short lived however; because there's an even sillier looking creature at the end of THIS film.  A sort of super-sized Mr. Hyde.

The visual effects are pretty bad in this movie.  At times they look plastic, like an unfinished animatic that Pixar might have created for Toy Story 3.  And the virtual environments are terrible.  They don't match the live action elements of the shots in lighting nor tone.  They look like really bad matte paintings, with no three dimensional elements.  I mention all this because it is so distractingly awful that I find it difficult to concentrate on the story (what little there was).  It takes me right out of the picture and constantly reminds me that it is ONLY a movie.

The climactic sequence plays like a standard issue good guy versus bad guy brawl.  But there's nothing to really care about.  The characters' fates don't matter.  I'm just expected to cheer for the good guys because, well, they're the good guys.

It's a curious tactic to fill your movie with action sequences, but to film and edit them in such a way that the viewer can barely see what's going on.  A punch here, some machine gun fire there, a guy ducking for cover, a kung fu kick, a vampire bite, a sword slicing someone's gut, etc.  All filmed with shaky-cam, and edited at a breakneck speed that would make even Moulin Rouge envious.  There's not much to make this movie reccomendable.

- crocoPuffs