Alright, then. Let’s do this. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
It’s an awesome comic book franchise written by Alan Moore and illustrated by
Kevin O’Neill. It’s an incredibly likeable, satirical, affectionate steampunk
adventure. It’s written by the man who also wrote the best comic book of all
time, Watchmen, but it’s very
different to that.
Some of you may be familiar with the concept of LXG, but I’ll just sum it up quickly for you. The comic is a
pastiche that crosses over a countless number of works of fiction, particularly
public domain fiction, imagining that the world’s greatest literary characters
and events exist in the same universe and frequently run into one another.
The idea of bringing together the
world’s original superheroes from classic literature and letting them interact
with each other is such an amazing concept and Alan Moore did it in a way that
hadn’t really been done before, at least not to this level.
This was published by DC Comics under their Vertigo imprint in the UK
and America’s Best Comics in the United States, which are tailored for mature
readers. Though it contains characters that families have enjoyed for
generations, Alan Moore’s murky cynicism and social/literary commentary
imaginatively darkens the whole thing up to make it a sensible but fun comic.
Volume One saw the first and most memorable line-up in the League of
Extraordinary Gentlemen, a superhero team assembled by the British government to
defend Victorian England. Sort of like a Victorian version of The Ultimates, in a way. Allan Quatermain, Mina Harker, Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde, Captain Nemo and the Invisible Man
assemble to retrieve the Cavorite, a space-travel machine from H. G.
Wells’ The First Men in the Moon,
which has become involved in a gang war between the "Devil-Doctor" (clearly intended to be Fu Manchu, but not named as such to avoid copyright issues) and
Sherlock Holmes’ archenemy Professor Moriarty.
Volume Two placed the team in a compressed version of the events of H.
G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, with
the fate of the team drastically shifting at the height of Martian invasion.
The comic is good, but not as great as the first one. The story gets really
slow and the ethics of the comic are very, very confusing. I know that moral ambiguity is a crucial part of Alan Moore’s writings, but I think punishing the book’s
villain by having him get raped is just disgusting. Seriously, Alan, you went
too far there. It pretty much kept the same sort-of Victorian themes as the
first volume, but after this volume, the creators felt that the Victorian
setting would wane in
interest.
Black Dossier, which is considered a sourcebook graphic novel
instead of Volume 3, shifts the setting to the 1950s and becomes more
imaginative with its crossover themes, dangerously flirting with copyright infringement. Alan Moore used a creative method to use
copyrighted characters without using their names and backgrounds directly,
avoiding the need to pay royalties or the threat of lawsuits.
For example, one of the villains of Black
Dossier is a womanising MI5 agent named Jimmy, who from hints and
recognisable traits is clearly intended to be James Bond, though his full name
is never given and is therefore immune from the law. But this is where I feel
the series becomes tired and overly complicated, when incredibly obscure and
unrecognisable characters (from fiction I’m perhaps too naïve to be aware of) become involved.
The formerly exciting superhero-fantasy story becomes a mess of throwaway
references, intrusive pornographic scenes and boring spy characters lacking
personality, before Volume 3
insensitively portrays boy wizard Harry Potter as the Antichrist. The
further series also brings to light Moore’s hypocrisy. Don’t get me wrong, I
really respect Alan Moore and enjoy his work (V for Vendetta is a true masterpiece), but he was so pissed off about
DC’s prequel series Before Watchmen
because it took characters he created and expanded upon them, with Moore
believing that a sequel or prequel should only be made if the original author
would approve. Well sorry, but the series The
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is built up entirely of material created
by other creators and the story tends to do horrible, horrible things to some
of those characters. Moore’s other book Lost
Girls is a porno-comic about famous underage girls from
literature getting into orgies and getting raped, and I’m pretty sure L. Frank
Baum, Lewis Carrol and J.M. Barrie would be extremely hurt by this! I haven’t
read and don’t particularly care about Before
Watchmen because I find it unnecessary since all the information on the Watchmen universe is complete in the
original book, but I’m not going to talk down to it or steer people away from
it because it could be an affectionate expansion on a modern masterpiece. So
it’s okay for Alan Moore to take classic, well-loved characters and treat them
like shit, but when DC take the Watchmen characters and seek to affectionately
revive them for a modern audience, they’ve gone too far?
It’s pretty sad since the first volume of LXG was so damn good because it
had everything right about it. All the heroes are ones we’ve seen portrayed
hundreds of times, but the veiling of newer, more obscure characters means that
character histories are left way too vague and limited for legal reasons, and I
find myself struggling to find on the internet what these references mean. A new League is introduced in Volume 3: 1910, and they’re all just guys in suits and they’re
really boring. The first League had a pirate, and invisible man and a Hulk and
was so much more exciting. I have total respect for Moore and O’Neill for all
their work, but The League of
Extraordinary Gentlemen has become pretentious, boring and
sexually-uncomfortable.
I’ve become disenchanted and
uninterested in the franchise now and don’t intend to read the series if it
ever continues. It’s sad because it had such a promising start, but it’s not
like it’s the only comic out there, so. I consider volume one to be a complete
story. The first volume was a success at its time. After the first graphic
novel in the early 2000s, the idea of a movie adaptation must have sounded
amazing to fans of that time.
Oh, boy. 20th Century Fox got hold of movie rights and went ahead
with their own film version released in 2003, and what we got could be one
of the worst superhero movies we've ever seen.
They repackaged a comic book for
adults as a film for families. The very fact that this film even exists makes me
sick. The fact that some maniac in that company thought “yeah, that film is
going to be so popular” amazes me. You can’t tell me that somebody didn't come
up and say “you know what, maybe people actually DO want to see the comics on
screen. And maybe they want good actors. And a story. And maybe anything that
makes a good fucking film.”
Ah, 20th Century Fox. You really know what superhero comic
readers want. That’s why we got such memorable classics as Fantastic Four, Daredevil
and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, all of
which were produced with the sole intent of cashing in on a modern trend
without any heart given to people who actually like comic books or want to see
a film that isn’t centred on stars, special effects and boobs, or in the case
of Wolverine, naked guys.
I want to know why the HMV in
Leeds is always so overstocked with three of Fox’s worst films, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Alien vs. Predator. Oh, yeah. Because no bugger wants them. You see, you think
about the idea of this comic book being made into a movie and you see the poster,
and you get all these images in your mind of steampunk, and these Victorian
heroes crossing over with each other and you can really see the initial appeal.
The problem is, this is not a good film. It’s a horrible film which crosses
over fiction with no given thought. It’s like Van Helsing - scratch that, it’s extremely similar to Van Helsing - using classic characters in
a disrespectful and half-baked way.
Look at the poster. It’s so bad. The characters are plastered around
without rhyme or reason, there’s nothing exciting going on, and it doesn’t in
any way resemble The League of
Extraordinary Gentlemen. Is that Sean Connery? They’ve digitally-plastered
him so much that I can’t recognise him. I
don’t know what the hell is happening with that car, it’s just warping at the
left. And look at that, look at that ridiculous cleavage. Not restrained at
all. It’s like “hmm, we need to make sure people will watch this shit, put some
tits there”. This treatment of the one female character in the whole film is so
offensive. She doesn’t even show any tits in this mess of a film. This poster has
less class than a Marxist paradise. "A Hunter, a scientist, a spy, a vampire, an
immortal, a beast, an invisible man". A shitty film.
So I guess now we should get on
with the plot of this steam-powered disaster.
The film begins with Prussian soldiers stealing layouts of Venice’s
foundations by Leonardo Da Vinci from the Bank of England. Why these layouts
are in an English bank I cannot say. The film takes great care in making the
Germans look like Nazis despite being set 30 years before the Nazis. Around the
same time, British soldiers destroy a factory and kidnap scientists, and here
you realise that this is all the work of a madman who desperately wants the
pre-World War I tension between Britain and Germany to escalate.
Even though this film is crap,
and believe me, I’ll let you know why as we move along, I will give credit
where credit is due, and I have to say this is a good starting point that sets
up a scary and believable situation to get the film going.
The leader of these guys is called The Fantom. Wait, what? When did he
show up? Judging by the mask, I’m going to assume that this is the character
from Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the
Opera. Um, okay. Weird, but… okay. Notice when he speaks, his eye seems to
talk.
So we cut to Kenya where a British agent contacts retired and
disillusioned adventurer Allan Quatermain from H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, who has refused to
further serve the Empire since the death of his wife and son. Suddenly Quatermain is attacked by a bunch
of baddies. After a monotonous fight scene, and after Allan miraculously shoots
a bullet at long range out of a shotgun, his club is completely blown up. As soon
as the explosion happens almost every extra runs directly towards the
explosion. That is some of the worst
direction I’ve ever seen. Wouldn’t there really be some confusion and panic?
Wouldn’t people surely run away from the explosion? But no, apparently in
Kenya, the split second after a giant explosion, standard procedure is to get a
closer look.
So Quatermain agrees to go back to England to meet his new employer.
“Not ash good ash Phileash Phog. Around the world in eighty daysh?” says Quatermain
Wow. How subtle. You see, the
comics have a habit of having tiny references to other works of fiction,
and you have to really pay attention to spot some of them. This conversation
would have been better like this.
“Better late than
never, Quatermain”
“I can’t jusht travel
half way acrosh the world in no time! Who am I, Phileash Phog?”
So yeah, Quatermain goes into his new HQ and meets M. Yes, M, the intelligence
leader of James Bond, or more likely a predecessor. Hang on, Sean Connery
working for M? Why is that familiar?
Enter three other members of a proposed team - Captain Nemo from Jules Verne’s
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Mina
Harker from Bram Stoker’s Dracula and
Rodney Skinner, a guy who stole the invisibility formula of H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man. Like I said, I’ll give credit
where credit is due, and I think the special effects on the Invisible Man are
pretty good in the few scenes like this, especially when the camera pans behind
him and you can see the inside of his face-paint. The problem is the character himself. In the comics, he’s an arsehole,
and the worst of its kind. A murderer, a rapist, a traitor who promises to be
good if he can be cured. In the film, he’s just a bit of a cocky twat. I’m also mad how Mina Murray is simply introduced by walking in the
room. In the comics she was there from the start and is basically the narrator.
In my eyes, she’s the main and most interesting character in the comics and
she’s certainly not that here.
So, these guys go and recruit the title character from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray as the fifth
member of their… what the arse is this? Dorian Gray? The only fucking appearance in
the first series from Dorian Gray is on the cover of the first volume. Just…
just… I don’t even… ah, what the hell. You know what? I’ve spent so much
time pointing out the lack of resemblance to the comics that it’s slowing this
review down, so until I’ve finished with the plot, I’m going to pretend this
film has nothing to do with the comic book The
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Let’s criticize it for what it is.
Right, so while these guys are convincing a reluctant and cardboard
Dorian Gray to join their happy team, a bunch of Fantom’s bad guys come into
the room and shoot around, because pointless action scenes guarantee a good
film, don’t they? Fucking hell. These bad guys are worse shots than Imperial stormtroopers.
And while they’re fighting, Dorian Gray is revealed to be immortal and he helps
kill the baddies, and the team is helped out by a friendly intruder, U. S.
Secret Service agent Tom Sawyer. Yeah, from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Um… why? Well, take a guess.
20th Century Fox put
Tom Sawyer in the film for youth appeal and a guarantee that American fans
would want to see the film. I cannot begin to describe how dumb this is. You see, this character is just
thrown in the film and has basically no relevance to the plot. I imagine that
they wrote the script and then decided, “y’know, I’m gonna add somebody else in
wherever I can remember! We need a young, white, brown-haired American lad!
That will tie the film together!”
So yeah, Sawyer has been hired by his government to help because war in Europe could eventually spread
to peace-loving America, who, as we know, was neutral in the early years of
World War I, selling arms to both sides of the conflict. Very neutral. Quatermain
lets him in on the team and Mina is out-of-nowhere revealed to be a vampire,
permanently after her encounter with Dracula.
Yeah, just make her a vampire,
that’s your way of giving this character function. That and boobs. Whatever.
“They told me European
women had funny ways”, says Wilde.
Hahahahahah! No.
Moving on, Quatermain and Sawyer chase the hulking superhuman beast Edward
Hyde from Robert Lewis Stephenson’s The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Paris, and he looks bloody
ridiculous. Honestly, he’s worse than The Thing in Roger Coreman’s The Fantastic Four. He’s just a guy in a
really unconvincing foam suit, and he looks even worse when you see his skinny
little legs. He looks like Johnny Bravo! They take him to Captain Nemo’s ship the Nautilus and he transforms
into Dr. Jekyll, but you can only tell if you haven’t had a fit from the
flashing of the transforming effects. Jekyll signs up and the group is
complete.
Nemo discovers flash powder from a cool Victorian camera and he begins
to think there’s a traitor on the ship. Jekyll’s special Hulk serum goes missing and
everyone blames the Invisible Man, who they cannot find because, as I may have
mentioned, he’s invisible.
Mina and Dorian are talking. “I wish to erase
the flaws of my character”, says Dorian.
Oh believe me, there are too many
flaws with all these characters.
Dorian talks about his powers. As in his original story, Gray is cursed
to never age while his enchanted painting ages for him. If he ever sees the
painting the effect will reverse, he’ll age and decay blah blah blah.
Mina shags Dorian for… um… no reason. Without giving anything away,
it’s a subplot that has no meaning and would have had no effect on the plot had
it not been there.
The Gang of Extraordinary Pricks go to Venice, where they think the
Fantom’s terror squad is going to sink the city in an attempt to spark war. As
soon as they reach the city, bombs immediately go off. Man, these superheroes
suck at this. And guess what the plan is. Fantom wants to knock over the
buildings into each other in a domino effect.
What?! Buildings don’t work like
that! I don’t know anything about architecture or any of that shit, but I know
that buildings don’t fall over like dominos! Even if that happened once, it
wouldn’t keep going like this until it destroys the whole city! Sweet Jesus,
what the hell is happening? This is the worst action sequence I’ve ever seen.
I suppose now is a good time to talk about the special effects. They
suck. They’re really not great. I mean, they’d be good if this was a low
budget, independent film, and I don't think good special effect need a great film. This looks kinda like one of the better Asylum films. The problem is, this is supposed
to be a big-budget Hollywood movie and these effects don’t show what films were
made of at the time. This film was released only 10 years ago, and at that time
we had Spider-Man, The Lord of the Rings, fucking Shrek. I mean, they’re not the worst
special effects, at least not in this sequence, but they’re still damn bad. I
mean, they couldn’t even put people in these streets! Wouldn’t people be, like,
running around scared?
Maybe they’re running towards the
explosion like the guys in Kenya.
Mina turns into a flock of bats. Oh fuck this sucks. Still not as bad
as the Dracula Brides in Van Helsing. Sawyer drives into a building awesomely (America FUCK YEAH!) and Nemo
blows up the building to stop the sequence of collapsing buildings. Sawyer
escapes without even a bit of ash on him. Of course he does.
007, sorry, I mean Allan, chases the Fantom around somewhere only to find that he’s, dun dun
duuuun, M! Ahem. Yeah, he’s M. Makes sense
to me. He’s been sending these guys on stupid tasks and only showed up for like
3 minutes at the start, so it’s not really surprising that this guy is sketchy.
The buildup to this twist… I didn’t notice it. And frankly, I don’t care. The heroes deal with the explosions and it turns out that Dorian Gray
is the traitor, shooting Moby Dick’s
Ishmael with the Golden Gun from a certain Bond film and escaping with M in an
escape pod.
Nooo! Ishmael! The guy who had,
like, two lines!
Seriously, this is the most pointless "tragic death" ever. We have no
emotional connection to this guy at all. It’s not like Agent Phil Coulson in Marvel's Avengers Assemble where we actually feel
really sad, because we’ve had time to love that character, not just because we
saw him in both Iron Man films and
the first Thor film, but also because
he interacts with each of the Avengers, becomes their friend and gives them
motivation to band together as a group. He was a major character with a great
deal of narrative importance. Hell, Coulson might as well be considered an
Avenger himself. But let’s not bother trying to compare LXG with a good film.
So yeah, Dorian’s evil. Yeah,
like we weren’t expecting that twist at all either. Dorian Gray wasn’t exactly
a moral hero in his original story, and Stuart Townsend’s awful performance
didn’t hide the fact that he’s a complete dickhead, who quite obviously is
betraying everyone. This film has nothing to hide. And wait a minute, when we
first saw Dorian, he was all like “no I don’t wanna join the team” and then it
took Fantom’s men’s attack on his house to convince him to join the team. If he
was in on it since the start, why did he let Fantom trash his house? In fact,
why didn’t he just say “join the team. Fuck yeah?”. Then this arsehole tells
Mina about his only weakness, an enchanted painting of himself. He told them
about his only weakness when he knew he was going to betray them? What? PLOT HOLE!
The team get a message from M&M's saying that his
plan was to bring together these people to ensure that he would get his hands
on plans of the Nautilus, Jekyll’s serum, Mina’s blood and a sample of
Skinner’s DNA to develop new weapons to sell in the upcoming World War.
So… your plan was to bring
together a team of the world’s greatest superheroes who combined could achieve
virtually anything, and somehow you expect you’re going to just beat them? You
put these people in the same room and think it will all go smoothly for you?
So yeah, it turns out there’s bombs on the ship and it floods.
“Bomb Voyage”, says Dorian Gray. Here, I can't help but hear the character Bomb Voyage in The Incredibles saying "Monsieur Incredible!".
Jekyll becomes Hyde and drains
the engine room of leaking water in a dire special effects scene. Then the guys
get a message from Skinner saying that he’s been spying on M in his Mongolian
factory. They meet him there where he surprisingly hasn’t frozen to death
despite being bollock naked. Good thing he is invisible, because there’ll be
some major shrinkage going on right now and that would be embarrassing, especially in front of a lady. He says
that the scientists there have been forced to make the weapons because their
families are imprisoned, yeah because we needed that explanation.
So, the confederation of unconventional gentle folk attack Judi Dench’s
fortress. Mina goes to kill Dorian because she’s apparently mad because they
had sex, I’m wondering what the point in this is. You shagged him, you stupid
bitch. They’re both seemingly immortal so their fight drags on a bit. But it
ends when Mina finds Dorian’s enchanted painting which ages while he stays
frozen in time, and she forces him to look at it and he melts away with age like
Julian Glover in Indiana Jones and the
Last Crusade.
Dr. Henry Jones and Sawyer go after M-inem, who Quatermain reveals to be none
other than Professor James Moriarty, the nemesis of Sherlock Holmes. Okay, when did Moriarty show up?
I know he was revealed to be M in the comics, but there were hints all the way through the
comics. Sherlock Holmes isn’t even mentioned in this film and there was no
buildup to this revelation! Maybe if, like the comic, there was a flashback to
his fight with Holmes at Reichenbach Falls in The Final Problem, this would have made sense, but no.
We’re just told who he is and the film assumes we know exactly what it’s
talking about. Every other character has their origins explained very well in
subtle dialogue and single sentences, such as Skinner, Mina and Hyde, while
Quatermain’s origins are explored throughout the film. When Moriarty shows up,
we’ve never been given anything related to Sherlock Holmes anywhere in this
film and we’ve just got to deal with it. Moriarty is my all-time favourite
fictional bad guy, but this version is lazy and stupid. He’s the Napoleon of
Crime for God’s sake! Also, why does his accent suddenly change? He goes from
posh and sophisticated to terrible cockney.
Nemo, Hyde and Skinner fight off a boring army of bad guys until one
of them drinks a full bottle of Hyde’s serum and he becomes…. um… yeah. A big, red, grotesque Hyde. This looks like a Playstation 1 game. This is by far the worst CGI monster I’ve
seen in a live-action film. He looks like a deformed mix between Marvel's Carnage,
Tenacious D’s Satan and, again, Johnny Bravo, with half the animation quality
of the latter. It’s absolutely terrible. I can’t even talk about this thing.
The Invisible Man gets burned protecting Sawyer and somehow we can see
his burns… why? He’s invisible all the way through him! His flesh can’t just
suddenly become visible when it’s burned! Because science!
So, Moriarty mortally wounds Quatermain and glides away like a piece of
paper and runs off with what’s left of his experiments. Sawyer takes into
account some of the lessons Quatermain gave him with shooting and shoots
Moriarty in the snow, with his mad science sinking away into the sea.
Quatermain tells Sawyer to enjoy the new century and dies. We cut to Kenya,
where the League pay their final respects to the late James Bond- I mean Allan
Quatermain and they leave into the distance. A witch doctor performs some kind
of ritual and lightning strikes Quatermain’s grave, leaving the ending
ambiguous and hinting a sequel. Pfft, yeah right!
Well, that was a needlessly
depressing and inglorious ending to the film. Does the team stick together? Is
war averted? Do we see what becomes of Moriarty’s men? Does Alan Moore put his
head in his hands and wonder why this thing ever happened? All questions left
unanswered, apart from the last one, of course.
Dear God, this film is one of the
worst pastiches of shit I’ve ever had torture myself with. This film does not
do the comic justice at all. And let’s go onto that subject. Adapting comic
books.
With film franchises based on comic books with long histories and
countless characters, you can understand why most superhero films take personal
liberties to present the concept to the big screen – the X-Men and The Avengers
for example, have decades of continuity, dozens of spin-offs, crossovers,
alternate universes, a wide mythology and literally hundreds of characters, so
X-Men is a loose concept that is welcome to new stories. Then there are comics
that exist on their own in completed stories and do not have many years of
history connected with them – for example, Alan Moore’s Watchmen is extremely restricted with its ideas and its very
specific story elements are the driving force of the comic, therefore the film
was made as an incredibly faithful, almost identical adaptation only taking
liberties where necessary, respecting that it was a singular work (if you don’t
count Before Watchmen). The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
existed as the one six-issue graphic novel at the time of the film and the
entire history of the team exists within the comic. The film just gets the jist
of the comic and decides “fuck it” and goes off into its own tangent. It’s
like, it’s not just that these guys have never read a League comic before, I don’t think they’ve read a comic at all. It
would be so easy to just keep to the mythology of the comic and all the ideas
presented in there. The clever plot of the comic is replaced with a predictable,
uninspired one, the visuals and overall childish theme of the film massively differ
from the adult-oriented, satirical adventure of the comic and the characters
are completely unrecognisable from both Alan Moore’s take on them and the
original works by the talented authors of the Victorian era.
As a film on its own, it’s a
complete mess. The nonsensical plot, the awful
dialogue, the unnecessary characters, the lack of character development, the
fixation on stars and special effects over an enjoyable story and the inability
to attract your interest to the characters makes it completely unenjoyable.
Why they thought Sean Connery would fit the role of Allan Quatermain I
will never know. He is so unenthusiastic about this role and he bores you more
and more with every non-dramatic scene. He’s probably the worst actor in the
film and yet they promoted the film as “hey, we’ve got Sean Connery!”. It’s one
of those one-star films. Is it coincidence that this was his last film before his retirement? The other characters really don’t matter at all. Some of them are just
thrown in when they’re needed and some have no input on the plot whatsoever.
The treatment of the one female character is awful; instead of the
feisty, intelligent narrator of the comic, we get an annoying personality-less
background character whose only interesting quirk is that she’s some shitty
vampire, and is here only for eye-candy; a character who is reduced to giving
into her primal instincts and putting out to Dorian Gray like some easy slut,
and then being angry for it afterwards. These offensive, somewhat anti-feminist
sympathies resemble less an Alan Moore comic and more a Frank Miller comic.
The special effects really suck. They’re incredibly difficult to look
at and don’t really give us anything exciting or original. The really boring
depressing tone of the plot rots away your brain cells, the subplots are impossible
to give two fucks about, the irrational and needlessly drawn-out action scenes
make you want the film to just get on with it, the pacing of the film just
makes you madder and madder and the lazy cinematography gives us nothing to
remember. The film wanted to spawn sequels,
and thought it would. What? It’s bad enough that there were maniacs who thought
the finished product would be popular, but there were also maniacs who thought
a second film could come out?
The only department I can give my appreciation is the costume and set
design, they’re amazing. Well, apart from Mr. Hyde. He looks like shit.
Seriously, I have no idea how
films like this go on release. It really amazes me that there are people who
pass this kind of shit off as good and have hope that it will be a memorable
film, when it’s just crystal clear that that won’t happen. Why can’t filmmakers learn from past mistakes? When will they learn
that it takes more than stars and CGI to make a decent film? Why can’t these
things be treated as art, and have real substance? Characters matter more than
the stars portraying them. Stories matter more than the abundance of action
scenes.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a film that’s so bad that
it’s certainly in a league of its own. And man, is it extraordinary.
