Next up on this 2003 comic-book two partner is an interesting one for me—this time, we’re talking the League of Extraordinary Gentleman. For the uninitiated, that started out as a graphic novel series from comics legend Alan Moore, who depending on who you ask is a genius, a lunatic, a grumpy has-been, or all of the above. The premise was a team-up of characters from across Victorian-era literature—Captain Nemo, Allan Quartermain, Mina Parker, the Invisible Man, and Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, and their slightly morally dubious missions under the command of a manipulative British secret service.
The first couple of volumes, involving mashups between Professor Moriarty and then The War of the Worlds, were great fun, with Moore obviously enjoying himself with the escapades involved while also occasionally satirizing the attitudes and backgrounds of these old works. Eventually, however, the series progressed into modern works, becoming more of an old man rant that boiled down to ‘back in my day we didn’t have any of this Harry Potter shite’. Still, that’s beyond the scope of this review, which looks at the movie adaptation that more or less followed the initial entry, and was by all accounts such a trainwreck in production that it lead to star Sean Connery quitting filmmaking altogether. How about that?
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| It was so considerate of them to add Sean's wardrobe struggles into the film. |
We start off with a series of robberies and raids in both Britain and Germany at the turn of the 20th century, with someone clearly trying to kickstart an eventual Great War—if that sounds familiar, it’s basically the exact same plot Guy Ritchie used for his Sherlock Holmes sequel. Either way, Britain starts off recruiting her own team of specialists starting off with Allan Quartermaine, as played by the aforementioned Connery. The sharp divergence in tone from the source material starts off immediately, with Allan here still being a totally competent sharpshooter in his grey years, as opposed to the opium-addled, rather secretly insecure faded once-hero as the graphic novel had it.
And it’s venerable star Connery that consumes a lot of the runtime—balancing an ensemble isn’t that easy, but the bias shows here somewhat. Mina, played by Peta Wilson, essentially lead the team in the material, but here is just sort of there, and is also a vampire now because hey why not. We even have a new character to be Connery’s sidekick—Shane West as a grown-up Tom Sawyer now as a US secret agent, and one looking very good for someone who’d have to be well into his sixties by this time period. To be fair, Tony Curran has an entertaining enough cockney take on the Invisible Man, as does Jason Flemyng as Edward Hyde, both of whom get at least some attention—which can’t be said about Naseeruddin Shah as Nemo, even if his Nautilus does look swanky.
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| Just try not to think about parking it. |
There’s also Stuart Townsend as totally-not-a-secret-bad-guy Dorian Gray, another slightly superfluous addition. The Oscar Wilde original was a cautionary tale of hedonism gone mad and obsession over physical beauty to conceal moral failing—here, he’s just bulletproof, because magic painting. Presumably, in this universe Elizabeth chose Mr. Darcy simply because his booty was just too bootylicious.
Anyhoo, the plot is a rather standard string of action set pieces tied together, with the highlight being a scene where the bad guys are destroying Venice for some reason I forget…so Captain Nemo needs to drive a car…around Venice…so that they can blow up a building…to stop other buildings from blowing up. I begin to see why the production was considered very arduous for some.
It’s not totally unwatchable, and honestly it’s not even the worst Sean Connery film from around this time (the 1998 Avengers film says hi—no, not based on those Avengers). I can sense that most of the cast are trying with what they have, and there’s scenes that are entertaining enough in isolation, like the one where our Dorian shows his colors. But as it’s own film it’s kind of humdrum stuff, and as an adaptation, it leaves me wanting—the graphic novel had a climax with a giant airship bomber levelling London, and here we get a lot of stumbling around some factory, with lots of CGI scuffling and stumbling. You could do worse, but you don’t exactly need to rush out to catch up on this.
So with that in mind, it’s no surprise most of the creators haven’t returned to any features, and I will say that even when Connery retired, he did eventually return to provide his voice to a bizarre cheap animated thing years later that…well…let’s just say I think I’d still take that over this. But all that said, I still think this is a series that could see another attempt at an adaptation as a series for sure—a similar thing happened with Moore’s Watchmen recently, and while he seemed grumpy about that, it seems to be his default state for a while now. Then again after the likes of this one, I do sort of understand why…
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