The listless movie adaptation of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen has the sweat stains of wasted energy; it's dreary, yet frantic. The film is inspired by Alan Moore's comics of the same name, an imaginative and grisly take on Victorian heroes.
Convened to battle a world-threatening evil, the league is a group of tough, forgotten or ignored British loners brought together at the behest of the queen to stop this encroaching danger. In the director Stephen Norrington's film, it's a plot engineered by a villain known as the Fantom to sink Venice, and, yes, eventually conquer the world.
To foil this plot, the British Secret Service agent Sanderson Reed (Tom Goodman-Hill), working under the auspices of the agency head M (Richard Roxburgh), is determined to bring the league of misfit adventurers together. The first summoned is Allan Quatermain (Sean Connery), the legendary hunter and explorer who, though well past his prime, is still capable of some world-beating moves himself.
PHOTO COURTESY OF FOX MOVIES
Quatermain serves as president of these immortals, a number that eventually includes the pirate Captain Nemo (Neseeruddin Shah) and an invisible man, Rodney Skinner (Tony Curran, using his voice wickedly well). As the plot thickens, others link up, like Mina Harker (Peta Wilson), a victim of Dracula who now uses blood-sucking prowess for good. She helps, um, seduce to the cause the dandyish Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend), whose portrait makes him invulnerable in addition to being impervious to aging -- a witty turn that Oscar Wilde apparently had no interest in. The noble, rambunctious and innocent Tom Sawyer (Shane West), now an adult operative for the US Secret Service, tosses his Stetson in.
Eventually the league tracks down its final inductee, Mr. Hyde (Jason Flemyng), who stalks the streets of Paris after fleeing London. Wearing him down until he becomes the docile Dr. Jekyll, the league members browbeat him into joining. Aboard Captain Nemo's magnificent blade of a submarine, the Nautilus, the team sets out on its mission to find the Fantom and end his perfidy. Between bouts of bickering and possible treachery, the league must try to combat the Fantom's futuristic inventions -- like tanks and flame-throwers -- with valor, daring and some of Nemo's own engineering marvels.
The film's screenplay by James Dale Robinson -- who toiled in comic books for some time himself -- takes pains to get the spirit of Moore's tale right. It's a formidable task, bringing the comics' dank, coruscating vision to the screen, an abiding interest of the producer Don Murphy. Murphy was also responsible for a previous Moore adaptation, From Hell, featuring another Victorian misfit, Jack the Ripper. Moore's melancholic and apocalyptic stories have a dour, murderous humor drizzling through the depressive clouds. No one in comics is his equal at conjuring the end of the world, and in his stories -- from The Watchmen and V for Vendetta through League -- the world is awash in brutality and ugliness, deserving of doom. Moore's pleasure comes in serving up Old Testament balance.
The league of his comics falls into two piles. One group consists of victims, like the haunted, doddering Quatermain, who battles an opium habit and fears that he's too old to do much good, and Mina, whose past with vampires is only alluded to (and who leads the group with her cool British common sense and an implied death wish stemming from her reputation as a fallen woman). Or else, they're sly, amoral psychopaths, like the invisible man, who's introduced raping young women at a girls' school, and Hyde, a calculating man-beast who remembers every slight done to him or his alter ego. The vengeance he finally takes on the invisible man is horrific, a fate that will never make it from the page to the screen. No one is going to follow that story to the letter in making a big-budget action movie.
Norrington and Robinson show glimmers of faith in Moore's vision -- that paranoia, suspicion and resentment as well as other major character flaws are more a part of the league's bond than fighting for queen and country. There's a visual tribute, too: the long, dark hair and beard on the Fantom make this bad guy look like photos of the lanky, vaguely frightening Moore. The addition of Dorian Gray, who doesn't appear in the comics, and a joke about Captain Nemo's first mate are in keeping with Moore's pillaging of British public-domain figures with a tattered history. (Not all are public-domain. The movie's see-through hero has to be called an invisible man, or risk a battle not even Quatermain could win: a copyright lawsuit.)
But Moore's League is a meditation on ambiguity, something large-scale-action spectacles have shied away from since The Empire Strikes Back, which came so long ago it now actually feels like a legend from Victorian England. Norrington's movie, which opens nationwide today, suffers from its own anxieties -- a dread of being too literate, if not too literary. That's an unintentionally hilarious failing, given the material's leaning on bookish figures -- in their way, the Marvel comics of their time. It's hard not to notice the connection between Hyde and the Hulk, and how much more impressive the visual effects are in rendering Jekyll's brutish alter ago than Bruce Banner's big green side. (It's here that Norrington's background as a conceptual artist presents itself.)
Connery's choice to portray Quatermain as unflaggingly stalwart displays a lack of nuance, killing off any hint of subtext. The closest he comes to fallibility is a weary cantankerousness that registers more like hostility than weakness. The crushing obviousness he exerts amounts to a misunderstanding of his power and his presence: he was also an executive producer.
Obviously, Tom Sawyer was added as a nod to young American audiences, and West is likably reckless.
Despite the intentions to be reverent, Norrington, who did a ruthlessly elegant job directing Blade, is bound and gagged by the need of League to be quick and glib. Somehow, you sense that Fox would be happier calling this picture The Justice League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. As it stands, the movie is neither gentle nor extraordinary. Gentlemen may be a better movie than other Connery fantasy-action films like The Avengers, but then again a glass of muddy water looks good to someone just coming in from the desert.
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