Release Date: July 11, 2003
Starring: Sean Connery, Naseeruddin Shah, Peta Wilson, Tony Curran, Stuart Townsend, Shane West, Jason Flemyng, Richard Roxburgh
Directed by: Stephen Norrington
Written by: James Dale Robinson
Distributed by: 20th Century Fox Films
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (intense sequences of fantasy violence, language, innuendo)
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a science fiction lover’s fantasy of an action film directed by Stephen Norrington (Blade), is about a group of literary antiheroes who all suffer from some sort of identity crisis. To name a few, there’s the adventurer Allan Quartermain, a legend of the British Empire who’d rather live out his days in solitude; the submariner Capt. Nemo, whose integrity on the high seas is somewhat questionable; the (literally) invisible man Robert Skinner; and the erstwhile troublemaker Tom Sawyer, now grown into a Secret Service sharpshooter. Fittingly, the movie has its own questions of identity to answer, but whereas the gray area incumbent in almost every character in the movie has the potential for dramatic power, the movie’s issues are far less intriguing.
Literally, there is the question of what this movie ought to be called. In full, the title is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, drawn from the graphic novels by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill upon which the film is based. But various promotional material appends LXG to the front of this, as though any movie about superheroes needs a cool acronym (if a skewed one, though perhaps only to include the letter “X”), or simply refers to the movie as LXG alone. And, briefly, the movie was simply titled The League, obvious advertising shorthand designed to appeal to attention spans so short they are unable to make it past the third word of the full title. Such questions about the movie’s actual title are never good, because beneath all of the name-swapping is a truly underhanded desire simply to encourage moviegoers to buy a ticket to a very bad sci-fi/fantasy film before they can make a better, more informed choice.
To be fair, the movie does have a promising setup. Set in Europe in the year 1899, it follows the exploits of a group of heroes drawn from literature and assembled for the purposes of stopping a mysterious madman who threatens to draw the whole of Europe into a world war decades ahead of schedule. Called the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, they’re led by Quartermain (Sean Connery) and include Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah), Sawyer (Shane West), the Invisible Man (Tony Curran), a vampire named Mina Harker (Peta Wilson), the immortal Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend), and Dr. Jekyll (Jason Flemyng) -- sometimes known as Mr. Hyde. Pulled together under the auspices of M (Richard Roxburgh), whom James Bond fans will know as a top-level officer of the British foreign intelligence service MI6, they soon discover that the madman they’re after is looking for something far more destructive than the path to world war.
In essence, they are the X-Men of the Victorian era, but unlike the two X-Men films to precede this movie, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen features a minor-league cast by comparison. The exception, of course, is Sean Connery, who masquerades about the screen with the sort of panache that makes you think his Allan Quartermain deserves his own movie. But where first-rate actors abound in the X-Men movies, there’s no one to back Connery up except a group of unknowns.
They are also unknowns in more than one sense of the word. Not only do the actors feel as though they should be deep in the supporting cast of some other movie (though West, who plays Tom Sawyer, was one of the leads in the romance A Walk to Remember, and Townsend, who plays Dorian Gray, starred as Lestat in the vampire thriller Queen of the Damned), but in today’s comic book-driven culture, not even the likes of Dr. Jekyll and Capt. Nemo resonate with the movie’s 13-year-old target audience as well as characters such as Wolverine and Spider-Man. Any literary basis for this movie will be lost on audiences, especially in its adapted form onscreen.
This leaves us with a mediocre sci-fi adventure and special effects extravaganza, although the special effects are certainly nothing worth noting. The bulk of the special effects budget was clearly spent on Nemo’s submarine, the Nautilus, but even the murky plastic models used a decade or more ago in movies like Crimson Tide and The Hunt for Red October look better than the Nemo's boat.
The effects are no better elsewhere in the movie. In a number of scenes, explosions are obviously computer-animated; a telling display comes early on, when, in an attempt to kill Quartermain, the bad guys blow up a mansion moments too late. The crowd outside turns to watch the blaze, but not one of them flinches or is thrown to the ground, as might be expected from such a blast. In another scene, a man wearing a backpack flamethrower is unfortunately exploded, although the only way to tell is by listening to a misplaced sound effect -- he remains virtually unscathed onscreen.
That the special effects are so prevalent in place of what, on a bigger movie, would have been bread-and-butter pyrotechnics, speaks to the quality of the production. Though the producers and distributor 20th Century Fox did spring for an accomplished director (Norrington did Blade, one of the best and most original comic book adaptations of recent years, and one that came before the deluge of summer blockbusters), the screenplay by James Dale Robinson is long and clunky and takes frequent liberties with characters. Quartermain is perhaps the only well-developed character in the bunch; the rest are simply on hand to look cool. And Tom Sawyer, the only American, has a suspiciously large role in the goings-on -- but his presence is not nearly as questionable as his arrival, which comes almost completely unheralded in the middle of one of the movie’s many shoot-outs.
The script strings together its scant moments of plot development with plenty of generic action, and, as the movie is something of a fantasy, it spices these up with anachronistic weapons and tactics. In one scene, Nemo offers a stylish convertible for a car chase in an age of horse-drawn carriages, while in another, Quartermain has a gunfight with bad guys wearing armor-plated bulletproof vests. As cute as these jokey references are, though -- one almost expects Thomas Edison or Henry Ford to turn up in the background -- they do nothing to alleviate the sense of tedium that pervades almost all of The League’s action. There is an acute sense of been-there, done-that in this movie.
Which may be why it’s targeted at 13-year-olds, because the notoriously short-term memory that this demographic collectively possesses is ideal for the movie’s style. They may not know, or care, who Mina Harker or the Invisible Man are, but as long as there are bullets flying and things blowing up, any cast of characters will do. For the far more discerning viewers in the audience, however, it may be best to watch the X-Men movies another time. The X-Men might not have the same literary pedigree as the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but at least they’re interesting enough to make for a more extraordinary movie.
-- Craig Roush (crr225@nyu.edu)