So many years ago, I listened to a "Bad Movie Podcast" that featured "The League of Extraordinary Gentleman" as an early patreon-exclusive episode. On that episode, the general consensus was that the film was even worse than Twilight and got some of the lowest scores featured on the show. Years later I had mentioned the film to my mother, and she mentioned how she and my father greatly enjoyed the film. So, with two completely conflicting opinions, I felt compelled to watch the film myself to figure out just HOW bad the film was.
So I'm pretty sure, objectively speaking, this film is not good. It has poorly written characters who have no real character dynamics. It features some of the worse CGI I've seen in a long time. The editing is at times frenetic and hard to follow, while at other times it's long-winded and boring. If you could quantify whether a film is good or bad on a completely factual scale, this would fail nearly every metric of being a "Good" film.
BUT...
I found myself having so much fun watching this film. For real, I was unbelievably charmed by the absolute dog-shit CGI and Editing; I legitimately laughed out-loud when I saw some of the fire effects in the film. I thought the action scenes were "Good Enough". The characters of Dorian Gray and Mina Harker were able to combine sheer aura and shitty editing to make wildly entertaining action scenes, and when we add Dr. Jekyll to the mix, it gets elevated to a-whole-nother level. It's just such a poorly done production, I can't help but enjoy myself making fun of the thing.
Now onto the things that weren't "Fun-Bad", but were rather "Distractingly Bad", one thing I just cannot look past is how every character sucks. None of them have good dynamics with one-another, none of them can stand well enough on their own, and none of them have arcs or reasons for me to grow attached to them. The worst of the bunch HAS to be our lead himself, Allan Quatermain (as played by Sean Connery). He just brings nothing to the table, being outshone by the rest of the cast (and considering they're all bad characters, that's saying a lot). He has a pseudo-arc where he blames himself for the death of his son, and then finds that same spark when teaching Tom Sawyer how to shoot better. There is a scene where Quatermain is teaching Sawyer to shoot better by giving him some advice and trying to let him shoot a moving target (a rubber ball floating in the water many feet away). Sawyer misses, Quatermain says, "You got close", and then Quatermain walks away leaving Sawyer high-and-dry. You can see how a scene can be done well in a better movie, but you will end up repeatedly disappointed with how the film just doesn't take those opportunities.
I think that's the most insulting thing about the film, though. You could SEE the POTENTIAL in the film if they had just done some things differently. If Quatermain actually had an arc about his son's passing. If Dorian Gray were a more complicated villain. If Hyde had sacrificed himself midway through the film. If Captain Nemo had ANYTHING. The entire movie had all these opportunities for good character-writing or storytelling, but instead squandered it all because they truly did not know what they wanted to do. All they knew were that scenes like this happened in movies, so they should happen in LXG as well.
At the end of the day, even though the film is absolute rubbish, and I can't in good faith recommend it to anybody; I cannot deny that I had fun watching the film. Maybe it will get old over time with how much time it wastes, but I did enjoy all the bad effects and action sequences. -7/10. It's still a 7, but like... an ironic 7, if that makes sense.