- Studio: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
- Release Date: Jul 11, 2003
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Succeeds the same way the original comic books did: by making the conflicts and dilemmas basic enough for a five-year-old, while giving the heroes and villains glamorous outfits and layers of complexity, to thicken the broth.
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63In a summer of high-octane action and testosterone-boosted thrills, this movie is out of its league.
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63The concept is high but everything else is merely fair to middling, one more or less watchable B-movie in megabucks clothing.
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60The filmmakers tried to give everyone a main storyline and ended up diluting everything. With so many characters, the film lost some focus.
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60Robinson's script is alive to the material's literary roots, although there is a sense that the brakes have been applied so as not to push into territory perceived as too esoteric for American teenagers.
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50Here, finally, is a superhero movie your AP English teacher can enjoy.
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50It depicts the world of a century ago in a way that comments on the anxieties facing the world today, and it does so, at least for a while, with cleverness and a sense of fun.
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42The movie is based on a 1999 series of comic books by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, but the original tone of deadpan historical audacity has been replaced by a kind of wax-museum literalness.
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42The film wears out its welcome by the halfway mark, becoming a silly spectacle.
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42One more bloated effects-o-rama lumbering through a formula plot (super-villain out to rule the world) without much zest, imagination or awareness of its own absurdity.
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40Simply put, it’s too much of a good thing, this unreined tumult of chaos.
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40The irony of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is that it has the most literate pedigree of any action movie you're likely to see this year or next -- and it's been made by people who seem to have no sense of how to tell a story.
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40League begins as a smart variation on the summer blockbuster, then loses its nerve in a second half sure to satisfy neither cheap-thrill-seekers nor fans of neglected literary oddities.
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40Moore invested his characters with flaws, with a tangible humanity; God knows they never felt the need to explain themselves, as the film does, rendering it something akin to one long footnote.
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40These guys have dumbed down a comic book.
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40Has the sweat stains of wasted energy; it's dreary, yet frantic.
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38Outrageously vapid and overdone movie.
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38Having these characters interact is both the joke and raison d'etre of "League." Its story is beyond banal.
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38The murkiest-looking movie since Ben Affleck's “Daredevil” and about as lacking in charm.
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38Has the distinction of being much dumber and pulpier than the comic book on which it's based -- the ink practically comes off on your fingers as you watch it.
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38Despite its preposterous leaps of logic, it somehow still emerges a reasonably entertaining summer blockbuster.
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38How does an embarrassment of riches turn into mere embarrassment?
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38What a riveting movie The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen might have been! And what a rickety mess it turned out to be when the people responsible lost faith in the origin of the material!
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30Nothing anchors the lighter-than-air story as it drifts away under the direction of Stephen Norrington ("Blade") into an FX stratosphere where wit, character and vigorous storytelling cease to matter.
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30And you wait--and wait--for the magic of movies.
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30It just doesn't work...This isn't a blend of modern and classic so much as a collision.
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25Except for Connery, who is every inch the lion in winter, nothing here feels authentic.
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25Just when it seems about to become a real corker of an adventure movie, plunges into incomprehensible action, idiotic dialogue, inexplicable motivations, causes without effects, effects without causes, and general lunacy. What a mess.
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25Opium- addicted Allan Quatermain becomes none other than Sean Connery. At least he gives a real movie-star performance, which is more than the other gentlemen manage. Extraordinary? Balderdash!
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20Bloated and incoherent.
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20Extraordinary is the very last adjective that comes to mind.
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20Even if, per Wilde, all art is quite useless, it need not be quite as useless as this.
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20A stiff. I don't know the comic book series, but it could hardly be as lifeless as this leaden adaptation, in which the weapons have more personality than the characters and the nonstop action often feels like no action at all.
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12Unfathomable balderdash.
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12Six guys and a gal who flatline on arrival. Easily the lamest action-adventure fantasy since “Wild Wild West.”
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10It's not brazenly bad or heroically bad or stridently bad. It's bad in all the old, dull ways of being bad: poor performances, absurd story, dreary special effects, witless dialogue and the excessive length of someone taking himself far too seriously.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 25 out of 63
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Mixed: 3 out of 63
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Negative: 35 out of 63
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PaulE.0
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John10One of the most awesome movies you could ever see. Everytime it's on, I like to watch it. Why the hell would these critics be so harsh?