Friday, July 11, 2003

WHEN SALMA HAYEK WINS THE THALBERG, WILL THEY SHOW A CLIP? How bad is League of Extraordinary Gentlemen?

Bad enough to have multiple reviewers compare it to the Will Smith/Kenneth Branagh/Kevin Kline travesty Wild Wild West. Among the things the Philadelphia Inquirer's Carrie Rickey has to say about it?
Easily the lamest action-adventure fantasy since Wild Wild West - which shares its fetish for Big, Bad Toys - League is the unwatchable in pursuit of the inexplicable. . . .

It's kind of the Harold and the Purple Crayon of Victorian popular literature - give fictional figures tools and see what kind of world they create - but lacking imagination, unified vision and humor. . . .

Ill-conceived, sloppily directed, shoddily acted, LXG looks like the work of a confederacy of dunces.

Across the building at 400 N. Broad St., the Daily News' Gary Thompson asks, "what prompted this debacle"?
There are many amazements on view in "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen." Among them:

A machine gun!

A submersible!

A car!

Once more, for dramatic effect:

A car!

"I call it...an automobile," says extraordinary gentleman Capt. Nemo, although I'm pretty sure I could have guessed what it was, because I live in the 21st century and I DROVE TO WORK IN ONE.

Never has so much summer-movie money ($75 million) been spent trying to impress audiences with crap that was invented 100 years ago.

But Soren Andersen of the Tacoma News Tribune levels what may be the ultimate diss:
There ought to be a special place in hell reserved for the people responsible for the especially awful "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen."

In that place, these people will be forced to watch, with eyes clamped open like Little Alex in "A Clockwork Orange," the following: "The Shadow," "The Avengers" and "The Hulk," pictures notable - or rather, ignoble - for their cheesy (yet ever so pricey) special effects, their preposterous plotting and their laughably awful acting.

To heighten their torment, these people also will be obliged to watch "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen."
. . .

You wonder: How could a class act like Connery wind up in a picture so crummy? And then you remember: He also was in "The Avengers."

I'll never delete the email where my friend Jon reviewed The Avengers. In part:
This movie was so bad, that my friend and I were trying to figure out what was intended by it; as if, it couldn’t have been that pristinely, exquisitely awful just accidentally. It was so bad that you weren’t really disappointed, just confused. It’s not like we were sitting there thinking “If only they’d ___ed the ____, then the ___ wouldn’t have seemed so ___ and I would have been able to forgive all the __ing ____ that ___ ____ in the _____ reel.” No. It was like coming to work in the morning and finding a full bucket of warm shit in the elevator. “It can’t JUST be a bucket of shit, can it? Why would anybody put shit, in a bucket, in an elevator? There must be something else... some explanation...”

Nope. Just a bucket of shit. Totally worthless. Remarkably worthless, in fact. Significant, for it’s utter lack of worth. A perfectly pure entertainment vacuum has been achieved in this film.

I used to have to think when someone asked what the worst movie I’d ever seen was. Not any more.

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