Review: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003)

I've long since given up on the notion of movies based on popular comic books matching their inspiration. After all, moviegoers have complained since the dawn of cinema that "the book was better," so why should comic book adaptations be any different or better, even if they are, in a sense, already storyboarded for Hollywood?

With The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, though, no one involved in the production of the movie seems to have gotten past the cover of the first issue of the comic book.

The concept, as originally dreamed up by writer Alan Moore and artist Kevin O'Neill, is basically the same: Take the modern idea of the superhero team--individuals with different powers banding together to fight evil--and make it retroactive to the Victorian era. Thus, fictional characters created by the authors of that time--Verne, Haggard, Wells, Stoker, Stevenson, Conan Doyle--could meet, talk and share adventures together. Director Stephen Norrington seemed like a fine choice, having done well with another comic book character in Blade; and screenwriter James Robinson is himself an award-winning comic book writer for series like Starman and The Golden Age.

And yet, beyond that basic concept, the comic and the movie have virtually nothing in common but a title.

The cast is led by Sean Connery as adventurer Allan Quatermain (not "Quartermain," as seen on a grave marker early in the movie; the end credits correct the spelling), reluctantly recruited by a mysterious government agent named M (Richard Roxburgh) to lead a team against a villain calling himself the Fantom, who's trying to start a war between England and Germany by rolling tanks through banks in London and Berlin and getting each country to blame the other for the crimes and who plans on blowing up a conference in Venice. The team consists of Captain Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah), the Invisible Man (Tony Curran), Mina Harker (Peta Wilson) and Dr. Jekyll (Jason Flemyng), all present in the comic series. Additionally, Norrington and Robinson toss in Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend) and Tom Sawyer (Shane West) for good (or, as i happens, not-so-good) measure.

Once the team is assembled, apparently knowing all about one another's adventures (as if they'd all read the Cliff's Notes for the novels they appear in), they rush about from one action sequence to the next, all of which are remarkably uninvolving (I guess there really is a limit to how much shit one can see blow up before one ceases to care) and none of which do much more than pad out the less-substantial-that-the-Invisible-Man plot, which could have cut in half without missing much. It turns out that the Fantom (why spell the name with an "F" when the proper spelling could have tied the character, however loosely, back to Gaston Lereux's creation?) is someone else, of course, who is yet another character from Victorian literature and whose identity is easy to figure out for anyone outside the movie itself.

Anachronisms and inconsistencies abound. Captain Nemo, in addition to creating his submarine, the Nautilus, also invented the automobile, which looks like a cross between a Rolls Royce and the Batmobile. And did you know that the canals of Venice are deep enough for a full-sized submarine to cruise down, or that Venice doesn't have all that many canals but lots of dark, winding streets for cars that haven't been invented yet to scream down? Neither did I.

The characters bear little resemblance to their literary counterparts--Mina Harker is now a full-on vampire, while Tom Sawyer is awfully handy with guns and automobiles (Mark Twain would be amazed) and Dorian Gray will die if he ever looks at his portrait, which takes all the damage while he remains pretty, pretty, pretty. The inclusion of Sawyer seems particularly gratutious, as if dumb Americans wouldn't go to see a movie starring a bunch of actors with foreign accents. They could have at least tied the character back to his roots somehow--a "white picket fence" reference or something. But that would require more depth than Robinson (or how ever many other chefs dipped their ladles into this soup) can manage. The actors do the best with what they're given; Connery is suitably gruff as Quatermain, Wilson scores well with both one-liners and fight scenes (not surprising, given her starring role in the La Femme Nikita TV series) and Shah expresses what he can from behind a blatantly fake beard (they spent all that money on CGI, but couldn't come up with decent facial hair?).

Maybe I'd have enjoyed the movie version more if I'd never read the comic book (or, for that matter, any book period). But I know the wonders that can be worked with these characters and the fine work that Norrington, Robinson and Connery have all done in the past, which makes this result all the more disappointing. It's been reported that Connery and Norrington fueded openly on the set and that Connery made edits to the final cut. But polishing a turd still only leaves you with one thing: a shiny turd. And League isn't even that shiny. In fact, it's downright dull.