is that it failed, in almost every way, to live up to the standards of the original comic books upon which it was supposed to be based. It got about three things right (one of which was the title), but it was mostly wrong.
As a B-grade flick, it isn't *that* bad, but as an adaptation of a comic book which many people found tremendously funny, subversive and arch, it is a disaster. If they had made a movie about a cigar-chomping wombat and called it "Harry the Wombat," and left everything else as it was in the movie, it might have been OK, although a lot of folks would have seen that it was a rip-off. But that sort of thing is expected from the film industry, so NBD.
The bottom line is that, when making a movie based upon other source material, either stay true to the source, or state at the outset that the original source is merely a jumping-off point, a source of inspiration. This is what Disney did with the recent "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides." I've read Tim Powers' novel twice, and knew that there was no way to adapt it to the screen as Tim wrote it, or even to easily fold it into the Pirates universe, and Disney knew it, as well. They used some elements of the novel (and did it well, I thought), but stated right at the beginning that the novel was merely the inspiration for the movie, that the movie was not going to be an adaptation of the entire novel. The same thing should have been done with Howard the Duck.
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