League of Extraordinary Garbage

I saw LXG last week and just had to comment. This is easily one of the worst action movies that I've seen in a long time and should never have been made!

The plot is predictable. By this I don't mean that I should have known what was coming, I mean that I would predict to Julie (and she sometimes to me) what was going to happen and, voila, that's exactly what happened. The plot twists weren't. Most garbage coming out of Hollywood these days isn't deep but this is absurd.

The characters are wooden. The League is comprised of British pulp fiction heroes of the late 19th century: Mina Harker, Alain Quartermain, the Invisible Man, Dr Jeckyl (and his alter ego), Dorian Gray, Captain Nemo. Of course they added Tom Sawyer to give it some American flair. With this cast you'd think the characters would be interesting but they were anything but. They spent a ton of time explaining who they were (as most of the general public don't know these characters) and essentially no time on development. The only character that was at all interesting was Dr Jeckyl and only because they played up his natural internal conflict rather well.

The action was confused and poorly done. Quite a few times Julie said that it felt like a video game, and she was spot on. The problem is that video games make good video games but not good movies. And LXG would have made a really bad video game, to boot.

And the Nautilus! OK, so they have a sub the size of a tanker that can easily weave its way through the canals of Venice and through rivers to the heart of Asia? Give me a break! To make matters worse, there is no reason to have the bad guy's fortress in the middle of Asia -- they could have done the same cool mountain/snow/ice thing by setting it in Antarctica (and had a literary reference to boot if they'd claimed his fortress was in the heart of the Mountains of Madness). Look, I'm all for the suspension of disbelief and all but that is absurd!

The biggest problem, in my mind, is that they took a great limited series (released as a graphic novel) by one of the better writers in comics about some of the coolest characters in late 19th century British literature and turned it into a horrid and uninspired movie. Crap! Crap! Crap!