League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (LXG)
Directed by: Stephen Norrington
Written by: James Robinson (screenplay), based on graphic novel by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill
Starring: Sean Connery, Stuart Townsend, Peta Wilson, Jason Flemyng

To quote one of Sean Connery’s many corny one-liners in this movie, “I’m waiting to be impressed”. Like all of the many comic book adaptations that have emerged in the past couple of years, I went into this movie trying not to get my hopes up and basically expecting the worst. And for once I was NOT pleasantly surprised — I actually did get the worst. I guess I should have known there would be problems when they took a clever and original graphic novel written by Alan Moore and shortened the title to three simple letters to make it more marketable.

The idea behind the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a great one and it absolutely should have made for an exciting movie. Unfortunately, the big budget summer blockbuster crowd is not necessarily the most suitable audience. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was more of an underground comic book, and as such, it would make sense as more of an artful, underground movie. I mean, we’re talking about classic English literary characters that most teenagers are probably not even familiar with nowadays. Basically the idea is this: what if a number of the most famous fictional characters were not fictional at all, and they were recruited to form a team of adventurers to fight evil? Characters like Allen Quatermain (British adventurer/hunter), Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, Wilhelmina Murray (wife to Jonathan Harker, slayer of Count Dracula), Hawley Griffin (the Invisible Man from H.G. Wells’ novel of the same name), and Captain Nemo (captain of the Nautilus from Moby Dick).

LXG was directed by Stephen Norrington, best known for helming the first Blade movie. He did a good job with that movie, but here he tried to use an identical visual style and it doesn’t work. Everything is overly dark and murky, to the point where you often can’t even see what’s on screen. Add this to the fact that the action scenes were done with a lot of shaky camera work and quick cuts, and half the time you’re just guessing at what’s happening.

The special effects were questionable too, and it’s not so much that they looked bad, but just that they were very inconsistent and very conspicuous. Skinner (The Invisible Man) often has his white face paint done with CGI, so that parts of the face are transparent, while in other scenes it is just the actor Tony Curran wearing white makeup on his face… a very noticeable difference. As for Mr. Hyde, well normally I’m all for using a rubber suit instead of CGI, but he just looked cartoony, and his transformation scenes utilized more fast editing techniques to save from having an expensive morphing sequence of some sort.

I guess the most insulting part of this movie is the writing. To take something so brilliantly written and just throw it all away in favour of an idiotic, formulaic and confusing action movie is a damn shame. No doubt this is because they handed the project to a rookie screenwriter who has absolutely no credentials. (Ever heard of the 1995 film Cyber Bandits? Me neither.) He uses so many action/adventure cliches that it quickly grows annoying. The plot is convoluted and hard to follow. The pacing is all wrong too, with some parts overloading on action while the middle of the movie is extremely slow and tiresome as character development is forced upon us.

The only thing this movie has in common with the original graphic novel is the characters, and they even screwed that up by adding an American literary hero in order to give American audiences someone to root for. This was a stupid idea… the whole point of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic is that it takes place in Victorian Era England. What the hell does Tom Sawyer have to do with Victorian Era England? Not to mention his character adds the worst element of the story, the cheesy father/son relationship between him and Allen Quatermain.

I think the person I feel sorry for the most in this case is Sean Connery, especially considering he executive produced this project. He was hoping for a hit and something to revitalize his career, and instead he just ended up making people recall The Avengers flop he had a few years ago. I think Connery is another guy, like Schwarzenegger, who has reached a certain point in his career where everything he does seems like a spoof of himself. You just can’t take him seriously on screen and if someone hasn’t started using clips of his dialogue for prank phone calls, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.

This is one of those times where critics are almost unanimous in their scorn of a movie, and I really have to agree with them. For once, here is an open-ended comic book movie that I am pretty sure will not spawn a sequel. LXG is just plain bad. Even as a mindless popcorn movie, it fails miserably. Go spend your money on the graphic novel instead and experience this story the way it was originally intended. — Sean