Boring

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

It's somewhat interesting to review this film fifteen years after its release, now that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is leading the way in franchises full of superhero characters and when even a TV series, "Penny Dreadful," figured out how to better combine a bunch of Victorian-era literary characters together. Part of the reason "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" didn't work is that the script is terrible, especially after the initial recruitment of characters is done. Another is that most of the characters get short changed by the focus being on, besides the CGI, star Sean Connery, who, reportedly, argued with the director throughout the production.The bigger problem, however, is the disregard for those characters' literary traditions. Why even use them, then? I've never read the comics that the movie is based on, although I've heard plenty of grumbling about how it diverges from the series, but I have read most of the original novels, or at least seen other, better film adaptations of those works. Doyle, Haggard, Stevenson, Stoker, Twain, Verne, Wells, Wilde--so much to work with, so little used. I specifically came to this movie in my quest to see a bunch of movies at least partially based on Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula," and the mishandling of his Mina is arguably the most egregious here. Not only is she significantly marginalized from her role in Stoker's story, but also, I hear, from her leadership role in the comic. In the novel, she became the real leader of the gang trying to kill Dracula, while Van Helsing, akin to Sean Connery's role in the movie, did a lot of the loud talking many might mistake as leadership. She largely did this by becoming Stoker's surrogate storyteller within the book, sorting together the various diary entries, letters, records and other accounts that formed the book's epistolary structure. It would've been interesting if the movie had tried to do something similar given the characters and literary traditions involved.Instead, they turn Mina into a heroic vampire, and she fights another immortal, Wilde's Dorian Gray. It's awful. "Penny Dreadful" handled its immortals better, in that case Gray and the Frankenstein creatures, which I think was the best part of the otherwise lackluster series, as the immortals struggled with and divorced themselves from the lives of mortals. Oh, and apparently this movie's Mina is a chemist, too, for some reason, even though they have Dr. Jekyll and an Invisible Man aboard. (To be fair, I guess, it should be noted that almost every Dracula-related movie has diminished Mina's role and many of them are quite sexist about it.) Jekyll, when Hyde, is basically Marvel's the Hulk. Meanwhile, Nemo is merely a source of transportation, Tom Sawyer is there for supposed youth and American appeal and, as for "M," see another recent TV series, instead, "Sherlock."(Mirror Note: I've been noting the use of mirrors in Dracula movies, as they're often a prominent feature, but here mirrors are, instead, employed for Jekyll/Hyde, so the two can talk to each other.)

Despite a stellar cast made with some of the most famous and valid actors, the movie is nothing more than pathetic. With only fake backgrounds (simple static sketches, fixed 2d images abandoned even in the low production movies from decades), the film is encrusted with huge number of errors. Would have been better to film it with power point.

Having watched this movie years ago and loving it, I decided that it was time for another watch. Unfortunately, the movie turned out to be very disappointing. The plot of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was pretty unoriginal. A bunch of special people have to stop some evil dude before he destroys something. It's been used to death, but it works. Unfortunately, everything else is presented poorly. The characters are, to put it lightly, awful. There's so little development that you can't help but cringe every time they try to make you care about them or are presented with some sort of obstacle. I just didn't care what happened to them. If they all died it wouldn't have affected my view on the movie at all. Most of the characters felt like they existed for a single purpose too, such as providing a cool rifle for the main character or providing transportation for everyone. Furthermore a lot of the characters had useless skills. Considering the time in which the movie takes place, it seems rather inconvenient that someone would still use swords and his fists to fight when everyone's packing a machine gun. Yet somehow, it works, and it doesn't make a wink of sense. Some characters also had inconsistencies with their powers, specifically Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde. Part of why the characters sucked was because of how poorly paced it is. The first half-hour is spent getting all the characters together, the next half-hour has some "character development" and "plot", and the last hour is just the climax. So there's barely any time for anything but the ending, which unfortunately wasn't that good anyway. The movie barely gave itself any time to develop anything, which is one reason why it struggled so much. The special effects are absolute trash. Maybe for the time they were good, but nowadays they are unbearably bad. Now maybe that's unfair criticism considering when this movie came out, but it still stood out to me enough for it to be distracting. And considering they didn't have to animate everything is also distracting (like the wavy black cloak. It's a cloak, just make one instead of making a CGI one).The movie is extremely predictable. Now that may be because I'd seen it already, but it was years ago, and even now I notice that even if I hadn't seen it the events would have been the most blatantly obvious thing in the world. Now there was one unpredictable part, which was the twist ending. But it's presented so horribly that I actually didn't even understand it until a few minutes later when they had to explain it. The best twist endings are those that don't require an explanation, but when there's so little focus on it in the first place and then BOOM! It shows up again and it's the twist, you left scratching your head thinking "So what? What's the big deal?" until the movie has to explain it to you, at which point you say "Oh, okay". The twist doesn't make you freak out, even when it's explained, because you just don't care, and you have no reason to care. It would have been better if they just forgot the twist ending and moved on with the "story", because at least it wouldn't feel so dang cliché, nor would I have been nearly as confused. One thing I did like was the idea of a bunch of fictional characters from classic stories coming together in a team. It's sort of like the Avengers only none of these characters have anything to do with each other. It feels more like a giant fanfiction crossover, but that's not always a bad thing. In the way that this movie tried to approach it was good, but everything else suffered. Also I really liked the title. It's long and doesn't tell you exactly what the movie will be about. By that I mean it doesn't explain what the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is in the title, but it sounds cool so it gets you curious about it. It's a bit misleading though because there is a woman in it. Overall The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen had a few small cool things about it, but everything else was extremely lacking. It was predictable, poorly developed in every way, fake-looking, and oddly (and poorly) paced. In the end I wouldn't recommend this movie unless you want to either ruin your great childhood memories of it or if your just curious as to how it holds up.

If I was going to go by the first 15 minutes of this film, I'd say it was the foundations of a gripping and exciting period action film. Those introductory moments of this movie had me gripped, only to be botched by the biggest letdown I've ever seen. It's not often I don't watch a movie the whole way through, but this really did go from something great, to something so stupid it just falls into a league of its own! I realise this is based on a comic series of the same premise, but even in those boundaries this movie is rubbish!How does this amazing story start? In 1899, what resembles a British World War I tank breaks into the Bank of England and steals millions of Pounds of gold, the crime apparently being enacted by men dressed in German army uniforms. This is later compounded by a similar attack on a German Zeppelin factory, where British soldiers and a masked figure in a dark cloak destroy a large amount of equipment and kidnap a group of scientists. This results in the recruitment of Allan Quatermain, who is enjoying retirement in Kenya, right up until the moment heavily armed men burst in and try to kill him. Fending them off, he returns to London, whereupon he is confronted by an invisible man......and it's all downhill from there.The rest of the movie is just a chase across the world using ridiculous CGI technology and in the company of idiotically bad representations of icons of folk law and literature, including Dorian Grey, Captain Nemo (and a super-powered Submarine thing), chemist Mina Harker (who doubles as a bloodthirsty Vampire), Tom Sawyer (a US Secret Service Agent) and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (who apparently doubles as a weedy nerd and the Incredible Hulk!).Now that I know that these are character depictions of a comic series, I understand why this has been done, but for those who don't (like myself going into this movie), you'd think this was conceived through some kind of fever dream. Sean Connery flies off to the ends of the Earth to pursue a masked baddie, joined by a bunch of misrepresentations about as subtle as a train accident in Piccadilly Circus!For what I saw, Sean Connery was once again the most captivating actor in the whole thing, keeping me glued to every line he said. As for the rest, the problem is they act far too 90's, not in the way people would act in the late-Victorian era. Indeed this is a bit of a personal peeve but it's quite a jarring one as you don't exactly find yourself being immersed. Although the names of Dorian Grey, Dr. Jekyll and so forth are household names from literature, you really don't know much about them at all, it's based entirely on name recognition and that's pretty much it! So many questions, not enough answers, and I found myself being left completely uninterested from the 15 minute mark onwards.Overall, give this one a miss. It's not a film to watch if you don't know the comic, in fact it's not a film to watch even if you do. In general it is a very, very poor display, a sadly humiliating note to end Sean Connery's career on.