“The League of Extraordinary Gentleman”
20th Century Fox
Directed by Stephen Norrington
Screenplay by James Dale Robinson, based on the comic books by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill
Produced by Don Murphy and Trevor Albert
Starring Sean Connery, Naseeruddin Shah, Peta Wilson, Tony Curran, Stuart Townsend, Shane West, Jason Flemyng and Richard Roxburgh
Rated PG-13
(out of four)

“The League of Extraordinary Gentleman” answers the question, “How could you make a bad movie about a super hero group composed of 19th Century literary icons like Mr. Hyde, Tom Sawyer, Captain Nemo and a legally safe version of The Invisible Man?”

Instead of working on this interesting premise, the film is a standard action exercise that lacks strong action scenes due to rather murky special effects. It’s another film that gives the impression that the filmmakers were so ashamed of its special effects that they made it hard to see them.

Sean Connery plays the league’s leader, Allan Quartermain, H. Rider Haggard’s Africa-venturing Englishman. A representative of the United Kingdom comes to his African lodge to recruit him, and while Quartermain doesn’t feel any obligation to help Britain, he agrees after he sees the opposition’s destruction in the land he loves—Africa.

The evil forces are attempting to start a World War, and have attacked Britain while appearing as Germans and attacked Germany while acting British. The leader is a masked man with a scarred face named Fantom (“How operatic,” Quartermain says) who wants to take over the world, even if it means destroying it. The year is 1899, and such frightful innovations as missiles, tanks and machine guns are changing the way people kill each other. That’s right, the bad guys have tanks in 1899, giving them the upper hand.

Luckily, one of the Extraordinary Gentleman, Captain Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah), has his own set of vehicles, including a fancy car and a schnazzy submarine, the Nautilus. The sea vessel is computer-generated and is never properly married with the environment, but is still probably the best CG in the movie.

	Sean Connery stumbles onto a movie set and is dismayed to find that his son Indie isn't there—nor is Pussy Galore.

It certainly looks better than Mr. Hyde, the giant evil man who Dr. Jekyll (Jason Flemyng) turns into when he drinks his special formula. This Hulk-like transformation makes Hyde a giant man with even more gigantic arms, a giant man who doesn’t even look convincing in the fantasy of the movie. There were several long takes in which I could examine the monster, but I have no satisfying image of what he’s supposed to look like other than a blur of pixels.

The other members of the league are just as intriguing, but are also just as poorly realized. Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend), the immortal with an aging portrait, once had a relationship with Mina Harker (Peta Wilson), the victim wife of the hero in Dracula. How Mina passes as an Extraordinary Gentleman when all evidence suggests she is, in fact, a lady is beyond the knowledge of this reviewer.

Rodney Skinner (Tony Curran) isn’t the actual Invisible Man, but suggestive dialogue implies that the thief stole the actual Invisible Man’s formula before he died.

The final member, for those fed up with all the English people, is an American secret agent by the name of Tom Sawyer who helps out by infiltrating an ambush on the league. Quartermain admits Tom to the group because Tom reminds him of his son, who died on a mission because his dad didn’t train him well enough.

The comic book on which the film is based might have come up with interesting dramatic ideas involving the characters, but in this movie it comes off as exposition between poorly done action scenes that fail to go beyond convention.

For example, some might consider it more extraordinary to see how a character gets out of a building before it explodes than simply see him inexplicably safe a few minutes after the explosion, but that’s all the lazy screenplay can manage.

While intriguing characters occupy the film, little is done with them. The inner struggle between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde plays out decently, but never amounts to more than Hyde wanting Jekyll to take the potion and Jekyll refusing, until it’s necessary, at which point there are no problems with Hyde being out of control, which the film suggests will happen.

The film will likely even disappoint the seventh grader who rents it to fudge his book report because Blockbuster doesn’t have “The Portrait of Dorian Gray.”
jeremy@red-mag.com