![]() ![]() There is no better way I can think of to sum up the film's blatant asshole douchebaggery than to refer to its official acronym. It takes a work of ultra-nerdy Victorian literary fan-fiction and tries to turn it into some Michael Bay orgasm of high-tech machines, blurry fast cutting, explosions, and action choreography that's really just not worth trying to parse in terms of its relationship to three-dimensional space. It is appallingly stupid and incompetently made. Still, being the second-worst comic book adaptation I've ever seen is still a pretty substantial anti-achievement, and I'm certainly content to reserve that record for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Any statement beginning with "It has the worst." must contend with the fact that Catwoman actually has the worst, and it's really not even all that close. This is annoying, as it means that I cannot rip The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen all the new assholes it deserves with quite as much force as I'd like. ![]() ![]() Sadly, it only managed to hold onto that title for a little bit more than year, until Catwoman came along to set a lower bound for comic book movie malfeasance that will only be surpassed in the end times, when the Beast and Dragon reign over the world in the days before the resurrected Christ leads the righteous into battle. Indeed, if you'd asked me when the film was new, I'd have said it was the worst comic book adaptation, period (and in fact I did say it, though in those days I had no place to say it for posterity). We come now to one of the most flailing, shittiest of all examples: 2003's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which manages despite stiff competition to remain the worst adaptation of an Alan Moore-written comic ever filmed. Particularly in the decade between Blade in 1998 and Iron Man in 2008, everybody was starting to figure out that there was some real money to be made here, but nobody really had a sense of how the hell to put together movies to get at that money, and so, absent a number of exceptions so few in number that you can count them on the fingers of hand, the superhero comic book movie was pretty much a flailing shitshow for several years. But, while I have no desire to apologise for the ponderous mediocrity of the superhero genre as it is presently constituted, it's worth reminding oneself that it could be absolutely so much worse, and has been, and indeed part of the reason for the merciless quality control that strains all of the personality out of everything that comes out of Marvel Studios and the people desperately trying to mimic Marvel Studios is because nobody wants a repeat of the horrible old days of the late '90s and the 2000s. It's easy - very, very easy, I'd say - to look at the current state of comic book movies and feel nothing but cold dislike for the machine-pressed non-art that the genre has largely turned into, as we enter the third decade of the post- X-Men superhero boom. ![]()
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