FilmBlather.com

Taking Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and a gaggle of other notorious literary characters and making them action heroes: that's good. Casting a six-foot-two Shane West and having him play Tom Sawyer as a listless (but American!) hunk: that's bad. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen does that, and a lot of other boneheaded stuff, mostly out of laziness and complete disregard for any cinematic standards. It takes the skeleton of a concept from a popular graphic novel and merely lays it out on the screen, without developing it a whit. If you enjoyed the film, think what it could have been in the hands of, say, the Spider-Man team (Sam Raimi and David Koepp), and tell me you're not disappointed.

The title refers to a group of heroes who, in late nineteenth century England, gather in times of great peril to restore order and bring hope. When a masked villain calling himself the Phantom starts senselessly attacking various European locales, an English aristocrat named M thinks that the League must reassemble in time to prevent his planned ambush of a Venetian government conference. The leader is to be the famed hunter and hero Allan Quartermain (Sean Connery), and an envoy is sent to his retirement tavern in Africa to recruit him. M has already obtained three more extraordinaires -- the Invisible Man (Tony Curran), Captain Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah) and Wilhemina Harker (Peta Wilson), of Dracula fame.

That leaves an arbitrary two for Quartermain to find, though it becomes three when, during the recruitment of the immortal Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend), Tom Sawyer (Shane West) shows up and steals the show. Then, they're off to capture the Hulk... erm, Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde (Jason Flemyng), who is wreaking havoc somewhere in London in the form of a gigantic beast. With him in tow, Nemo's Nautilus, which is the film's only impressive design element, takes them to Italy and into the canals of Venice, where the League must stop a gigantic explosion with an even bigger explosion. I'm still not entirely sure how that works.

A serious problem is that Sean Connery, being 150 years old, can no longer sustain an action sequence. This requires director Stephen Norrington, who reportedly almost came to blows with the Scottish star on the set, to edit Connery to death, cutting his scenes together out of shots that last not longer than, and more often shorter than, a second. I'm not even sure we once get to see him follow through on a punch.

Of course, I'm giving Norrington the benefit of the doubt: he may just enjoy playing Edward Scissorhands in the editing room. Whatever the motive, his direction never generates any real suspense. Even more disturbingly, there is never an attempt on his part to do anything remotely extraordinary, to show us something original or new. He is content with rudimentary fistfights, bomb detonations and races against time. And in the context of this (non-)plot, it's just not interesting.

It would have been considerably more so, however, if the characters bore any resemblance to their literary counterparts. Tom Sawyer is a short, stocky kid with a penchant for mischief and a run-amok imagination, not a tall and skinny twenty-something with aspirations to become a sharpshooter. Similarly, Wilhemina Harker wasn't a vampire and Mr. Hyde was not the Hulk. The only cast member who acquits himself is Monsoon Wedding's Naseeruddin Shah, who at least sells the fact that he is playing a fictional legend. As an aside, maybe the one genuinely intriguing thing about LXG is that it portrays an eastern ethnic group as heroes rather than villains.

I'm not that difficult to please with this sort of thing; really, I'm not. Give me something I can care about, show me something I've never seen, and I'll cheer the loudest in the theater. I'm sure I will be the recipient of angry correspondence about how critics hate movies and overanalyze everything they see, but in fact my reaction to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comes straight from the gut: it's pretty boring. I've simply explained why.