The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comes across exactly the way you would imagine the stereotypical comic book story would: fun characters, fantastic visuals and a flimsy sense of dramatic craft.

Perhaps it’s just spread out too thin. Much like The X-Men, Gentlemen includes a group of superheroes with their various gifts. But where X-Men unified the characters’ struggles to a degree, Gentlemen tries to allow each character his individual victory. It might have worked with a stronger script, but here it just feels like a comic book.

The characters are interesting though, each of them based on figures from Victorian literature. Allan Quatermain (Sean Connery) is the Indiana Jones-esque leader of the group, joined by The Invisible Man (Tony Curran); the vampires Mina Harker (Peta Wilson); Captain Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah), who provides the submarine transportation; the ageless Dorian Grey (Stuart Townsend); the schizophrenic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Jason Flemyng); and the lone American, Tom Sawyer (Shane West). They are brought together by M (Richard Roxburgh), who seeks their help in putting down a terrorist called The Phantom.

It’s fun to see theses characters brought together like they are, but their generally scarce resemblance to their original characters makes you wonder why they bothered at all. For example, in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mina Harker never even has vampiric powers, and lost all taint of them when Dracula died. In Gentlemen she appears as powerful as Dracula himself. Furthermore, Mina’s bright, positive and sweet personality is completely dropped in favor of a dark, brooding, cold-hearted Mina in Gentlemen. Other things are just as silly, though understandable. Dr. Jekyll turns into a giant monster comparable to The Hulk, and Captain Nemo commands a sub larger than an aircraft carrier. Oh yeah, and Tom Sawyer works for the United States secret service.

It’s fairly engaging nonetheless, largely because of the pictures of London, whose dark beauty surpass those of Tim Burton’s Gotham City. Explosions and CG effects continually fill the screen as well, but not without the price of overshadowing everything else that’s going on.

There are a few twists in the story, but we are basically introduced to the bad guys, introduced to the good guys, and then watch them duke it out till the end. It’s a classic comic book story which is simultaneously great that it’s so cool and unfortunate that it’s so lame.

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