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I first saw Sean
Connery in a forgettable thing called Darby O’Gill and the Little
People, circa 1959. He
didn’t show much promise (it was a musical).
A few years later he was cast as James Bond in Doctor No,
which was, for him, akin to dying and going to heaven.
Almost immediately after Doctor
No became a hit he started complaining that he didn’t want to be
typecast and wanted out of the Bond thing.
Well, he got out,
finally, and did make some good movies (The Man Who Would Be King
comes to mind). But he’s come
full circle with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which defines
trash. I’m getting tired of
watching films full of scenes devoid of rationality, but I don’t write
‘em, I just see ‘em. There
must be one standard, generic script in Hollywood that everyone uses.
There are all these bad guys, see, and they have automatic weapons,
see, and the good guys are all unarmed and surrounded by the bad guys and
the bad guys open up with their automatic weapons and start spraying the
good guys with nine million rounds a second.
Everything is shot; the walls, the chairs, the tables, the books, the
glasses, everything…everything, that is, but the good guys, who never get
hit with anything. Nine million
rounds a second are sprayed all around and not one single, solitary bullet
hits a good guy. How many times
hence, in nations yet unborn and accents yet unknown are we going to have to
watch this?
To make it even
more ridiculous, you must compare it to the scene of Connery shooting
targets from a ship. The
ship’s rocking (well, it should be rocking, being at sea and all, but
it’s actually not rocking; with all the money they spent on special
effects, they couldn’t come up with one that simulates what it’s like to
be on a ship in the middle of the ocean), the target’s floating hundreds
of yards away in the ocean. Connery
has a bolt-action long rifle. He
waits while the ship sails farther in one direction as the target, a small
balloon type thing, floats off in the other direction.
He waits. It floats.
He waits some more. It
floats some more. Finally he
slowly squeezes the trigger and demolishes the target.
The way I see it is we are supposed to believe that the bad guys can
have automatic weapons and can spray the good guys who are only ten feet
away from them with nine million rounds a second and can’t hit anybody,
but Connery can hit a floating balloon four inches in diameter, about a mile
away from him from a floating ship with a single shot.
This is the level of the intelligence of League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen.
Connery’s the
Executive Producer of this, so who was he to complain about the quality of
the James Bond series when he’s responsible for something like this?
Where does he get off trading on his name to entice people, mostly
loyal fans trusting him, to come to see this garbage? This must be the quintessential film that spent all its money
on silly special effects. They
certainly didn’t spend anything on the script, or the director, or the
other actors.
There’s no
tension because even though this is overburdened with violence, we know that
none of the good guys is going to get so much as a scratch.
Talk about a film without a story!
There is no logic or reason to this whatever.
It’s just one violent special effect after another. A Plot?
We don’t need no stinking Plot!
I’ve now seen
three Hollywood movies in a row, Charley’s Angels II, Legally Blonde II,
and now this. They are all equally repugnant.
July 12, 2003
The
End
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