League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The

Wall Street Journal Collin Levey

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.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

The concept is high but everything else is merely fair to middling, one more or less watchable B-movie in megabucks clothing.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

In a summer of high-octane action and testosterone-boosted thrills, this movie is out of its league.

Film Threat Kevin Carr

The filmmakers tried to give everyone a main storyline and ended up diluting everything. With so many characters, the film lost some focus.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Robinson'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.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Here, finally, is a superhero movie your AP English teacher can enjoy.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

It 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.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

One 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.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

The 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a 1999 series of comic books by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, but the original tone of deadpan historical audacity has been replaced by a kind of wax-museum literalness.

Portland Oregonian Kim Morgan

The film wears out its welcome by the halfway mark, becoming a silly spectacle.

Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis

These guys have dumbed down a comic book.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

League 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.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

Has the sweat stains of wasted energy; it's dreary, yet frantic.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Simply put, it’s too much of a good thing, this unreined tumult of chaos.

Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky

Moore 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.

Salon.com Charles Taylor

The 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.

Premiere Peter Debruge

Despite its preposterous leaps of logic, it somehow still emerges a reasonably entertaining summer blockbuster.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

How does an embarrassment of riches turn into mere embarrassment?

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

Outrageously vapid and overdone movie.

USA Today Mike Clark

The murkiest-looking movie since Ben Affleck's “Daredevil” and about as lacking in charm.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

What 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!

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

Having these characters interact is both the joke and raison d'etre of "League." Its story is beyond banal.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Has 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.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

Nothing 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.

Slate David Edelstein

And you wait--and wait--for the magic of movies.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

It just doesn't work...This isn't a blend of modern and classic so much as a collision.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Opium- 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!

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Except for Connery, who is every inch the lion in winter, nothing here feels authentic.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Just 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.

LA Weekly John Patterson

Extraordinary is the very last adjective that comes to mind.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Bloated and incoherent.

Village Voice Ed Park

Even if, per Wilde, all art is quite useless, it need not be quite as useless as this.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

A 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.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

Six guys and a gal who flatline on arrival. Easily the lamest action-adventure fantasy since “Wild Wild West.”

New York Post Megan Lehmann

Unfathomable balderdash.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

It'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.