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Poster (c) 20th Century Fox
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is anything but. In fact, Stephen Norrington’s Gentlemen is so contrived, boring, and dull, it’s like watching paint dry while listening to a broken record of Gilbert Gottfried’s greatest jokes. Also, Sean Connery is not only too old, but will likely be compared to George W. Bush (“I’m waiting to be impresshed”). Face it, Sean, you’re too old to do films like you’re used to. Your role in Finding Forrester was probably too much of an action strain for you. If seeing a stuntman who looks like Sean Connery on a bad day, with different colors of hair, kick the crap out of some badly animated creature, than I think Gentlemen is all for you. If you’re like me and like stories that not only make sense but have some action and suspense, go see T3 or something.
What surprises me is not only the lack of depth of the characters, who James Dale Robinson expects us all to know (if someone flocks to a mindless summer action movie, should they know famous literary characters?), but how much I didn’t care about them. I tried to like it for the first fifteen minutes, but then I just gave up. Who cares about who the traitor is? Not only is it as obvious as a clown juggling loaded sniper rifles, but I just didn’t care. I can tolerate stupidity, but stupidity added to absurdity is just preposterous. And this isn’t even good stupidity, a la Johnny English or something of the sort. This is just bad stupidity.
20th Century Fox is almost as bad as Universal nowadays. Not only is all of the action faker than Britney Spears, but it tries to be so cool, when it’s anything but. I think guns shoot bullets, not just bright yellow lights. Gentlemen had some of the worst lighting I’ve ever seen in my life. At times it was too dark to see anything, while other times lights were flashing in my eyes. It was worse than staring at a strobe light for hours on end. Also, the sound was louder than the trailer for 2 Fast 2 Furious, and I swear I’m deaf now. Maybe I’ll download pirated movies now, so those light and sound people don’t get their paychecks and never work in movies again!
Now I don’t know the special “powers” of Allan Quatermain (Connery) (even though they tried to explain it multiple times), but I think being shot at point-blank range would kill somebody. If I understood it correctly, he’s undefeatable, but so were half of the other Extraordinary Gentlemen. Also, I don’t recall when swords usually beat automatic weapons during battle.
Connery does a terrifically terrible job as Quatermain. He’s trying to prove to Hollywood that he can still be a leading man, although nobody’s cared about him since the end of his Bond movies. Also, with his accent, which makes his dialogue even hammier, he can’t deliver any humor. The whole movie can’t hold anything. Its sorry attempts at humor were really bad. I smiled once at one innuendo, but that’s it. The whole movie’s failed. It has failed attempts at action, failed FX, failed acting, failed humor, and it basically failed at the box-office. However, it didn’t do bad enough to stop them from making The Second League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of fantasy violence, language and innuendo.
Review Date: August 7, 2003