The League of Extraordinarily Bad Action Scenes

[yendi]

Saw LEG (or LXG, as the posters call it, as the publicists have clearly learned everything they know from "ID4") last night with shadesong, karlita, and photognome. The good news: It's not as bad as Roger Ebert says. The bad: It's just as bad as Elvis Mitchell says.

I'm okay with changing the premise of a graphic novel (and I just re-read The Mask, perhaps the best example of a complete shift that worked, the other night). And some of the changes (like making Mina a vampire, and the addition of Dorian Grey) worked much better than expected. Others, however, did not. Most notable of these was the addition of Tom Sawyer to the cast. His character not only had no purpose, but also had nothing unique about him -- if they'd called him Huck Finn, or some character out of a Bret Harte story, or Billy the Kid, no one would have noticed. Really.

The plot itself was hackneyed, but might have worked with better pacing. The real problem, aside from pacing, is the action sequences. There were lots of big fights in the movie. And not one of them was well-filmed, or even comprehensible. Everything was speeded up to the point of unwatchability, presumably because none of the actors could fight (the exception being one fight near the end involving Peta Wilson).

I heard all sorts of rumors that Sean Connery had final cut on the film. I really wonder if the film was decent before he got ahold of it. The director (Stephen Norrington) had already given us a perfectly acceptable action/hero film in Blade, and the writer, James Robinson, has long been one of my favorite comics scribes. I wonder if there was a great movie here that simply got led astray.

It's worth catching on video, or after it hits the discount theatres. But don't waste real money on this one. See Pirates of the Caribbean again instead.

Comments

[irana.livejournal.com]

Wow. I was so gonna go see that tonight.

[stronae.livejournal.com]

the exception being one fight near the end involving Peta Wilson

Well, yeah. She's had plenty of training for that sort of thing. :)

::Hides::

[gmslegion.livejournal.com]

I certainly enjoyed reading Ebert's review, but I think it's sad that his disbelief was kickstarted by the geography of the film's Venice. I think that's an issue I can safely overlook. Our world doesn't have immortal bulletproof men; their world has whacking huge canals. Seems simple enough to me.

Is it six year-old friendly? Julian really wants to see it.

[yendi]

I'm not sure how kid-friendly it is. One or two curses (pretty much whatever's allowed in a PG-13 flick). As for scary stuff, Mina does drink blood a few times, although it's not as nasty as in other vampire flicks. There's also a scene in which a man disintegrates rather gruesomely, and assorted other miscellaneous cartoonish violence (lots of folks shot to death, blown up, etc). No real sex (there's a scene that's clearly leading to it, but the actual sex is cut). Otherwise, the only thing that might scare him is the Mr. Hyde transformations and monster effects.