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Two more reports from friends of mine - reliable sources both, as far as I'm concerned - who saw a preview screening and say that it's colosally awful.
So far it's scoring a dismal 30% on rottentomatoes.com, where I found this doozy of a review:
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Zero out of Four Stars
Though I'm a fan of Alan Moore, it's pointless to address the myriad departures made by the cinematic adaptation of his graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen--doing so would not only take too much time, but also miss the point entirely. Stephen Norrington's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen isn't appallingly bad only because it departs completely from its source material, but rather it's appallingly bad because it is a work of extreme cynicism and incompetence on every appreciable level. Five minutes into the film, a steam-powered tank has already stormed its way into a London bank (demonstrating a technical superiority for the bad guys that instantly invalidates the main conflict of the film) and a German zeppelin factory has gone the way of the Hindenberg, both scenes marked carefully by unhelpful title cards (London 1899, Germany 1899) that become something of an unintentional running joke--the only vaguely amusing thing to follow in what amounts to one of the most painful experiences to be had this summer short of dental surgery, an Andrew Lloyd Weber revival-in-the-round, or getting stabbed in the eye with a knitting needle.
(snip)
Because Norrington and hack extraordinaire, screenwriter James Robinson, think their audience is composed entirely of screaming idiots (trenchant warning for those literary-minded readers of the graphic novel), the dialogue is almost completely composed of flaccid attempts at establishing some sort of narrative and providing footnotes along the lines of "I'm Mina Harker--my husband Jonathan Harker and I, and a professor named Van Helsing, hunted a great evil. A great evil named Dracula. He was from Transylvania." Worse, when the crew find themselves in a nighttime Venice (everything occurs at night in this film in a transparent attempt to camouflage the godawful CGI background mattes) and a character calls out, "Hurry up, we need to find the bomb," the only response is first the very reasonable, "What bomb," followed by the sad realization that they're going to have a hard time finding this bomb because they're all starring in it.
The central conceit of the picture, that these disparate misfits should band together to stop something called a "World War," is given a glancing look in deference to the strait-jacket constraint of the superspy/evil genius formula, all of it lent an air of the ironic when much of the purely hypothetical audience for this movie not only knows that there have been two World Wars since 1899, but something like a hundred James Bond movies. The action is spastic and impossible to follow and so Norrington, logically, twice stages three separate incomprehensible fights simultaneously (in the proud George Lucas tradition) so as to induce nausea and intense irritation. Whenever Mina becomes a vampire (forgiving first that she is overtly a vampire and next that she is ever anything besides a vampire), her transformation is inexplicably accompanied by a massive colony of bats; Dorian Gray is both immortal and invulnerable; though Captain Nemo dubs his invention of a roadster "an automobile," everyone promptly calls it a "car;" and Mr. Hyde looks just like a small Welsh actor in a blow-up rubber suit. The special effects are all dreadful--a fact exacerbated by their unforgivable lack of continuity: to wit, after Gray gets riddled with bullets and regenerates, his shirt, oddly enough, regenerates, too, while the problems with the Invisible Man animation are numberless and exhausting.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen isn't good by any possible measure of quality. It's a snarky, self-knowing, self-hating film that instantly alienates reasonably intelligent people by being condescending (and apparently written by that sign-language chimp) before proceeding to alienate breathtakingly thick people by having the temerity to feature characters from non-Oprah-approved books. It is so terrible that it deserves mention with such classics of "I Want My Money Back Theater" as Wild Wild West and that other Connery standard, The Avengers--cementing my long-held belief that Connery is just the Scottish Burt Reynolds with, until the last twenty years or so, a slightly better agent. The picture is punitive, garish, and loutish, a flyblown corpse of an idea pocked by its constant explosions and battered by its dialogue and imperceptible performances. I've seen worse films than The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, of course, worse this year, even, but the bottom is ultimately just the bottom, and when you get this close to the absolute nadir of cinema, subtle measures of relative merit just don't mean much anymore
.-Walter Chaw |
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