Who does he think he is, Indiana Jones Sr.? Oh, wait . . .

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (and sorry Fox Marketing Department, I'm not calling it LXG) is a Victorian-era X-Men: a group of gifted individuals band together to fight a monstrous evil. Hey, it's even based on a comic book. The twist here is that the characters are based on a collection of 19th century literary figures.

You've got Mina Harker, the young lady Dracula sunk his fangs into and who now has a touch of the vampire herself; Captain Nemo and his palatial submarine, The Nautilus; Dr. Jekyll who morphs into a Mr. Hyde that makes the Hulk look puny; Dorian Gray, whose portrait ages while he stays young and foppish; swashbuckling adventurer Alan Quatermain; a Cockney thief who also happens to be invisible; the Professor and Mary Ann. No, wait, that's Gilligan's Island.

Anyway, all this extraordinariness is brought together because somebody's trying to stir up a war and they need to figure out who. (I suspected Donald Rumsfeld, but apparently he wasn't around back then. Or maybe that's just what he wants us to think.) Some guys in German uniforms rob the Bank of England; others in British uniforms blow up a German zeppelin factory. Somebody gets chocolate in somebody else's peanut butter. Countries are on edge and it's up the League to defuse the situation, with the help of American secret agent Sawyer. (They're careful never to call him Tom, which is a good thing; in 1899 when the story's set, Tom Sawyer would have been a middle-aged man rather than this shaggy-haired, Gen-X hottie played by Shane West in an effort to balance out the movie's demographics.)

The League of Sneering Gentlemen. In Vests.

Okay, I'll admit it. I read the first series of the Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill comic book, and it was fun. More fun than the screen version, sad to say. It had an edge to it that, apparently, big budget Hollywood movies aren't allowed to have. For one thing, the movie tidies up the characters quite a bit, making them far too respectable. In the comic book, Quatermain was well past his prime as a hero and when we first meet him he's an opium addict, something he struggles with through several issues. The Invisible Man was a homicidal maniac who would occasionally kill a few random passers-by on the way back from a mission. There were interpersonal tensions among the group. Most of the characters weren't particularly noble, or at least it took them a while to discover that side of themselves. Is it wrong of me to like them better that way? Screenwriter James Robinson's characters all sign up pretty quickly for the good fight and more or less get along. The changes may have been okay if the characters had been given personalities to replace those they lost, but instead they're left with none.

Worse, the pseudo-literary premise is really the only thing that's clever about LXG (okay, I caved on the acronym.) It doesn't so much have a story as a loosely thought out collection of action scenes. Some of them were kind of cool, I'll grant you, but they were mostly not too memorable either. And too much time is spent developing the father/son vibe between Quatermain and Sawyer. This could have been compelling if it hadn't been so overplayed; instead it just eats up time that could have been spent making some of the other characters more interesting.

"That Indian restaurant has to be around here somewhere."

There is fun to be had here. Production designer Carol Spier did a great job with the steam-punk setting, capturing a stylized version of Victorian-era London as well as the exotic interiors of the Nautilus. And there are some fine performances, including Sean Connery as the heroic Quatermain, Naseeruddin Shah as the imposing Nemo and Peta Wilson as the icy Mina. I also liked Tony Curran's cheeky turn as the disappointingly sane Invisible Man and Stuart Townsend's sneering arrogance as Dorian Gray.

But overall, the big screen League offers little of substance, and not enough flash to compensate for it. If you're looking for something really interesting, take my advice and read the comic book instead. Now stop sneering, I'm serious. Would it help if I called it a graphic novel?

Gorilla Pants rating: 1 out of 4 bananas