Few things are as sad as a wasted good concept. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, based on an Alan Moore/Kevin O'Neill graphic novel, posits the formation of a superhero team consisting of famous literary characters from the Victorian England age. Included are adventurer Allan Quartermain, the Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll and his alter ego Mr. Hyde, Captain Nemo, and a few others.

As far as fantasies go, this one is fascinating and full of potential. A movie about this team of turn-of-the-century heroes would require a unique vision to be able to make the most of the novelty value inherent within. These are characters whose psychological complexities are well-documented; they live in a time and place that feature stark divisions between classes, and between a colorful past and a technologically exciting future. Their stories conjure visions of darkness and sophistication. The worst way to handle a story about their exploits would be to make it like a campy modern-day slam-bang fight-loaded comic-book-movie.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen not only does this, it does it in clumsy, unimaginative fashion. Each character is melodramatically overplayed as if each of them was competing for the part of the Phantom of the Opera. Was Allan Quartermain (Sean Connery) giving the audience a warning when he growled, "I hate theatrics"? Maybe this wouldn't have been so bad if the movie's general atmosphere fit in with the style of acting, but the main bad guy is dressed like a cross between a Viking and a Mongolian warrior, a gigantic submarine sails in a Venetian canal, a car drives through concrete columns as if they were paper, and gunmen conveniently stop firing their weapons to rush a good guy who can only show off his fighting skills in hand-to-hand combat.

Nothing else in the movie comes to the rescue. The editing is bad, especially during the fights, when the most we see is one-second of random action before it cuts to the next. The computer effects work is bad -- scenes of Nemo's (Naseeruddin Shah) Nautilus look like cartoons inserted between live action. At one point, Connery leaps to avoid gunfire, and the movement of the character so clearly indicated the work of a stuntman in the ensuing edit that I did a double-take. A monster at the end of the movie threatens to take the crown of "Most Fake-Looking CG-Creature" away from the Scorpion King at the end of The Mummy Returns.

The plot is pretty bad, too, featuring a mad villain who hides out in a fortress as the heroes try to break in -- not an original idea by any means. Character development includes such used relationships as a father who lost his son long ago finding himself feeling fatherly towards a young recruit; and tension brewing between two characters who were once ex-lovers. They can't blame the source material for this -- the graphic novel didn't contain the character Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend), and it especially didn't have an out-of-place grown-up Tom Sawyer (Shane West) as a trigger-happy American special agent. As West's character, complete with a grating disappearing/reappearing southern drawl, is gradually revealed as the second-main character, one can only anticipate a sinking feeling.

And yet the movie wasn't painful. It was just bad. In fact, it almost seemed confidently bad. It's as if The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is trying to be bad and is using the most tested-and-proven techniques to accomplish its lofty goal. It's so good at being bad that it's almost admirable. Too bad the movie chose such an interesting concept for its exercise in camp.

(Released by 20th Century Fox and rated "PG-13" for intense sequences of fantasy violence, language and innuendo.)

Review also posted at www.windowtothemovies.com.