"The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen"

Despite Sean Connery and some impressive 19th century gloom, this big-screen translation of Alan Moore's culty comic-book series falls to earth with an incoherent splat.

By Charles Taylor

July 11, 2003 | In the opening scene of "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," a tank plows through the elegant Victorian interiors of the Bank of England. In short order, we see the destruction of an inn in Kenya, an enormous book-lined London sitting room and the center of Venice, with the Basilica San Marco among the buildings reduced to rubble. This a destructo-thon for those with a taste for Old World elegance.

There's no reason why "The League of Extraordinary Gentleman" has to be as bad as it is, considering the inspired pop premise of its source, Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's graphic novel. The two installments that have appeared in book form so far are a sort of cold daydream of popular literature. Set at the end of the 19th century, the comics tell the story of a group of heroes assembled by British intelligence to fight various threats to the Empire. The ingenious element is that all of these adventurers are characters from popular fiction of the era. There's the aged Allan Quatermain (the adventurer from H. Rider Haggard's "King Solomon's Mines"); Mina Harker, née Murray (from "Dracula"); H.G. Wells' Invisible Man; Dr. Henry Jekyll and his alter ego Edward Hyde (who takes the form of a grotesque behemoth); and Captain Nemo (from Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea").

Their contact with the British government is an ancestor of James Bond and, as in the Bond books and movies, the head of British intelligence is M, and his initial is a hint at his own fictional identity. Moore and O'Neill use these characters to play a sophisticated version of the fantasies kids indulge in about whether Superman could defeat Spider-Man. The graphic novels are written and drawn in a style that mingles the formality of Victorian literature with contemporary raunch and bloodthirstiness. When Hyde goes on a rampage we get to see him ripping bad guys quite literally in two, or chomping on their limbs. The Invisible Man takes advantage of the sexual liberties open to a man who can't be seen. When Captain Nemo first welcomes Mina Harker aboard the Nautilus, he greets her with, "If I must have women on my ship, it is preferable they are alive, I think." Of the Egyptian mob pursuing her, he says, "A Mohammedan rabble, please leave them to me," before impaling them with an automatic spear gun. Nothing in the way these heroes do business is cricket, and that's the nasty fun of it.

You can't blame the screenwriters, James Dale Robinson, Don Murphy and Trevor Albert, or director Stephen Norrington for wanting to tone down the carnage -- and the coldness -- of Moore and O'Neill's comics for a big-screen adaptation. But would it have been too much to ask for them to come up with a script? It's likely that the contemporary mass audience isn't familiar with most of these characters (perhaps more familiar with Jekyll/Hyde and the Invisible Man than with Quatermain, Mina and Nemo) from either the novels that introduced them or the various movies made from those books. So the screenwriters squander a great opportunity to provide an entertaining back story about the characters' origins. Incredibly, they don't even bother to orchestrate the way these characters band together; we're denied the pleasure of seeing them function as a group, complementing each other's abilities (which, despite the tensions and distaste they feel for each other, happens in the comics).

The movie is one blown opportunity after another. Sean Connery plays Quatermain (an improvement over Moore and O'Neill's depiction of him as a broken-down old opium addict) and when Richard Roxburgh (the duke in "Moulin Rouge") introduces himself to Connery as M, the filmmakers don't include a line or a joke to underscore the irony of James Bond meeting his boss's predecessor. The additions made to the cast of characters don't mesh well. At some point during a story conference, some exec must have decided that the movie needed an American character. But there are no lasting examples of action heroes from 19th century American literature. (They could hardly have had a tall cowboy type come in and introduce himself as the Virginian.) So we get Tom Sawyer as a United States Secret Service agent. It might have been witty if the movie had used the blank Shane West (who plays Sawyer) for a parody of American callowness set against European savoir-faire. As it is, he's nothing more than a Boy Scout along for the ride.

Next page: Stuart Townsend as Dorian Gray: Even more like an ambisexual glam-rocker than he was in "Queen of the Damned"