The premise of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is fascinating: take some of literature's most famous wounded heroes and team them together to fight a specific crime, kind of like a literati version of X-Men. Unfortunately, the execution is overshadowed by two solid hours of gunfire, explosions, and weak one-liners ("Call me Ishmael," says a limo driver—in 1899). There is a slight bit of fun to be had as each new member of the League is recruited, but forget trying to find in-jokes and allusions in most scenes, except for the most groaningly obvious ("You're missing a picture, Mr. Gray").
While Sean Connery is clearly the star (and the exec producer), Stuart Townsend is the cast standout, gloriously smarmy as the abovementioned Dorian Gray. Jason Flemyng (Snatch, Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels) gives a powerful, tortured performance as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, eliciting an empathy beyond even what readers of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel might feel. The rest of the cast ranges from simply not very good to utterly boring; additionally, the director couldn't decide whether his Skinner (Tony Curran) is more Hollow Man (CGI) or Powder (an actor with white makeup). Even venerated Indian superstar Naseeruddin Shah looks more ridiculous than sublime as Captain Nemo.

Somewhere in the mess of fires, explosions, hand-to-hand combat, and timeline anomalies is a story about redemption, facing one's own demons, righting old wrongs. But the noise and pace don't give the viewer any time to reflect on these themes, and by the time the film is over, we're left with more questions than insights (the largest of which is, "Okay, but what does Tom Sawyer have to do with anything?")

While LXG is light on literary allusions, it beats reading Cliffs Notes in study hall. Kids who have summer syllabi with many of the classics on it will likely enjoy this alternate version of literary history. Lovers of literature, on the other hand, will cringe, and should avoid this film at all costs.

Whether League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is true to the comics upon which it's based, I can't say. On its own, however, this film is very, very ordinary.

When you think of movies about unlikely teams, X-Men is by far the gold standard. The sequel wasn't as well received, but the first film pleased both comic-book fanatics and newbies alike. An attempt at superpower satire, Mystery Men (with characters like "The Bowler") fell flat, marking a low point in the career of most of its stars, including Janeane Garofalo and William H. Macy. And unless you have a toddler in the house, forget Powerpuff Girls and Power Rangers (though the Harry Potter franchise has a likable trio at its heart). Perhaps the best reluctant-heroes-thrown-together film is 1987's The Untouchables, although Reservoir Dogs and The Usual Suspects—hardly crime-fighting capers—are genre classics, if overly violent. Then again, LXG is pretty violent, too.

If you're looking for films based on classic literature, there's often a wide range in quality. Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has roughly 40 cinematic incarnations, ranging from the first adaptation in 1910 to a truly awful 1982 version and one told from the viewpoint of a love-struck housemaid (Julia Roberts) in 1996's Mary Reilly. The Dracula legend has been told even more frequently, with Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 version considered among the better ones, alongside the 1979 version starring Frank Langella and Sir Laurence Olivier. The best interpretation of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray came in 1945, with a cast that included Donna Reed and Angela Lansbury. And there are tons more—the antiheroes of Faulkner and Hemingway, the infinite mysteries of Sherlock Holmes, the classic (but mind-numbingly long) Dr. Zhivago.