League of Suck-Ass Gentlemen

If there's one thing that The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neil is not, it's pandering. It assumes some literacy on the part of the reader. It assumes for instance that you know who Mina Harker or Alan Quartermain, or Hawley Griffin are. It assumes you know some of their story. The movie that shares the name does not.

The movie is pandering and cutsey and assumes that it's audience are complete dolts (which may be the case, but I doubt anyone other than fans of the comic will be seing this film, and they will be sorely dissapointed). In the film each character gives a bit of a synopsis, as if to say, "Here's what happened in my book.

I'm not worrying about spoilers in this review, it's going to have them, but trust me, I'm not spoiling anything for you. Don't see this film. For once the critics are absolutely right. Avoid this film.

Here are some of my problems and things that are just damn dumb from the film to illustrate:

• Ok, the Nautilus is this big sub, right? It's established in the film early on from different shots that it's about the size of a battleship. Huge and whatnot. How then, does it fit into the tiny canals in Venice that they use Gondolas to navigate? How does it not bottom out? How does it turn once inside Venice?



• The movie shows when it shows the blueprints of Venice that it is made up of large buildings whose foundations rest underwater. Why then when they go under the city does it look like Venice is built on a giant pier with open space under the buildings?



• Speaking of those blueprints, if Nemo has a copy in a big book, why did the Fantom have to steal the originals in the beginning (Ignoring the question of why they were in the Bank of England and not in a museum or private collection to begin with).



• Why would blowing up a building in the sequence stop Venice from falling into the water? If there are multiple bombs as the movie says, wouldn't you have to blow up multiple buildings to get the same effect?



• For that matter, I really don't think that all the buildings in Venice are lined up like dominoes.



• Mina Harker is a vampire in the movie, right? How the hell is she out in the sunshine multiple times in the movie?



• How do you get inside Paris in a submarine? Apparantly Nemo knows how.



• When do these people have the time to get entirely new clothes every time a set gets ruined. In the first scene with Dorian Gray his clothes are shot up and then ripped down the front, but then in a later shot they are magically back to normal. Hyde rips his clothes Hulk style underwater (and gets them wet for that matter), but when Jekyll comes back up to the bridge, all smiles, his clothes are just like when he left.



• Speaking of smiles, why is Hyde always smiling? I believe that the only time he should ever smile is when he's done something nasty to someone. For goodness sakes in the comic (which this is supposed to be based) He buggers the invisilbe man and then kills him in a nasty way just for the crime of treating Mina badly.



• Why didn't they use Hawley Griffin, the original invisible man? Were they afraid that someone would confuse this with Kevin Bacon's The Invisible Man? I don't think that would really be a problem.



• Why does the invisible man's makeup keep going from allover his head to just the front to allover from shot to shot, except to save on effects budgeting. If they needed to save, just have the coat and hat imposed in.



• Wouldn't Tom Sawyer be at least 60 by the 1899?



• I got the impression Moriarty was building some kindof robots in his big-ass evil laboratory, they were just suits of armor with flamethrowers on the back?



• Wouldn't invisilble skin be hard to see? They had mounted invisible skin samples, but the invisible man was invisible all the way through, wasn't he? That would mean his skin is invisible on both sides.



• Nemo's science? All of Nemo's secrets of science fit in that one tiny little box.



• Why do they feel the need to explain everything? When Quartermain says that he didn't make as good a time as Phileas Fogg and then says "In 80 days?" The title of the book is not needed. It just makes it sound stupid.

I'm tired of griping about this movie. I'm guessing you get the point right?

The IMDB is wrong when it lists Richard Roxburgh as Mycroft Holms (M). He's not. He is M, but he is Professor Moriarty. The characters are not the same person. M is Mycroft Holmes in the book, but so is Moriarty. Two different people.

Don't see this movie. It's bad like Battlefield Earth bad. It should be buried and forgotten.