League of Extraordinary Gentleman was great fun.
The comic series is a genre-bending masterpiece to start with, an English major's wet dream of tiny in-jokes with utterly distinct artwork (particularly fun for me: noting the detail - Portraiture by R. Pickman, an utterly obscure character HP Lovecraft's fiction, beneath a portrait of some past members of the league).
The movie is... not the comic. But it is faithful to the source material. We have Allan Quartermain, star of dime store novels and adventures in Africa, Wilhelmina Harker, object of Dracula's desire, Dr. Jekyll, and properly Indian Kali-worshiper named Nemo.
I've only a limited familiarity to Quartermain as a character. The others, though... I worked my way through those books as a youth, as I suspect many others of a certain bent have. It gives me a certain joy to know that these characters have found another voice, another life.
(Incidently, more promise stares out from the walls. As compelling as Nemo and company are, seeing Natty Bumpo, Rip van Winkel, Faust, Athos, Porthos and Aramis together in a picture in the background only leaves me wondering at what past adventures there might've been... as I said, I love the concept).
The literary adventures of these characters could not be more different, yet I was thrilled to see this new vision of the past; the Argonauts re-born, so to speak. Art direction here was wonderful. 1890s Europe was a gilded age of steam and gears, and I believe that comes forth marvelously in the film, a time before the whole world was explained by science. And it is in that context that anachronism can turn to belief. Nothing felt wrong, nothing felt out of place.
As lush and detailed as the film is, there's only the barest of pauses in the action of the film. I can't even say how long the movie is; it felt like mere instants. The action sequences worked. As different as these characters are, so to is each one's approach to action, and I found it all very refreshing. It was, truth be told, the anti-Matrix. In this movie I saw the bad-assness that "The Hulk" could've been. I saw Connery as tough as nails - Indiana Jones and John Wayne, rolled into one. I saw something I desperately enjoyed seeing. No stop-action CG bullet-time crap. No half-assed philosophy. Just the right sort of swashbuckling goodness for a hot summer day.