The most frustrating thing about THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN is that the first 20 minutes are so darned good, crackling with intrigue, adventure, and Sean Connery being Sean Connery. Alas, somehow James Robinson’s script takes a promising premise, the one created in the graphic novel of the same name by Alan Moore and Kevin ONeill, and then loses its way, becoming by turns tedious or cheesy or, for unendurably long swaths of time, both.
That premise would be an alternate universe where Alan Quartermain, Dr Jekyll, Captain Nemo, Dorian Grey, the Invisible Man, and a host of other literary characters are real and all living in 1899. This universe, though, has many of the same problems as ours, including an unstable geopolitical situation that will in due course lead to world war. As in all universes, there’s a villain who’d like to speed things along, and so we have The Phantom, not to be confused with that other comic book character. He’s a guy who sees the big picture, at least monetarily, and so his plan is to trigger the war, end civilization as we know it, and make a tidy profit in the arms trade. Like so much of the story, details are fuzzy and it’s never made clear how he will then spend the filthy lucre with the world in ruins, but that’s the least of the problems here.
Queen Victoria’s government assembles those superheroes I mentioned above into the eponymous League in order to thwart The Phantom’s nefarious schemes. Her agent, in a sweet nod to Connery’s Bond past, is named M. They bop about on Nemo’s submarine, Nautilus, traveling from one crisis to another, leaving destruction, clichés, and bad dialogue in their wake. Things like the only switch that can save the Nautilus from sinking being conveniently located in the bottom of the boat, the part that’s already under many, many feet of water, or lines like “That monster is too big” or “The bombs have gone off” in a veritable orgy of stating the obvious. As for The Phantom, he’s anything but, showing up everywhere, even Venice, which he’s wired to go up like the Hindenberg and from which he seems in no hurry to leave. In this universe, Darwinism would have solved the world’s problems a tenth of a second after the fireworks begin, but not in the one depicted in this film.
Speaking of Venice, we’re asked to believe that the Nautilus, a craft the size of an aircraft carrier, can easily cruise the canals of La Serenissima, as the locals call it, without scraping either the bottom of those shallow canals or the palazzos that line them. It’s not the only inconsistency. Our invisible man sports dark black stubble poking through the white greasepaint he smears on to render himself visible. To which we in the audience can only say, “Huh?”, even given that the CGI that lets us see the reverse side of that greasepaint when he takes his hat off is way cool.
The worst sin is the waste of interesting characters. Connery’s Quartermain is a hunky action hero entering his golden years, bad eyesight and all, with a biting, self-deprecating humor. Stuart Townsend as Dorian Gray has the intriguingly blasé attitude of a man who’s lived so long that nothing is interesting anymore. As for the rest, it’s a mixed bag. Peta Wilson as the vampire Harker is starchy and seductive, but Jason Flemying as Dr Jekyll with a CGI Hyde is given little more to do than dither about, muttering to himself, or his alter ego, take your pick, about being such a milquetoast. As for Hyde, he’s a flesh-toned Hulk, though an articulate one that takes Mighty Mouse as its model, huge arms and shoulders supported by incongruously spindly legs. Tony Curran as the Invisible Man, leaves much to the imagination, perhaps too much. In this is he is much like Naseeruddin Shah as Captain Nemo, who spends the film trying to fight his way out from behind the enormous beard that the makeup people have glued to his face, all but obscuring it.
On the other hand, and as a rich example of Emerson’s Law of Compensation, the sets are opulent, lovely to look at with their lush period detail and imaginative hybridization of 20th century technology with Victorian ornamentation. Even the Nautilus is tricked out to look like a cross between the Queen Mary and the Taj Mahal. And if only someone had, like The Phantom, looked at the big picture, and devised a movie to take place on all those expensive sets, what a wonderful world it would have been.
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