Comic Tales: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
With its big, special effects laden, action sequences it’s easy to dismiss The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as just another Hollywood blockbuster but look a little closer and you’ll see there’s a lot more going on here than initially meets the eye. There’s a political subtext that most reviewers missed on the films initial release, with the League formed by the world’s most powerful nation to search for The Phantom and his weapons of mass destruction only for the enemy to be revealed as someone far closer to home. M/Professor Moriarty is clearly an analogy to George W. Bush, just minus the Texas drawl, with James Robinson’s biting script offering a very negative view of the War on Terrorism.
Oh, who am I kidding? This is utter crap, the kind of film that gives comic book adaptations a bad name. Right from the start, with the introduction of Allan Quatermain in the aging but still virile form of Sean Connery, it’s clear that this is going to bear little relation to Alan Moore’s graphic novel. Gone is the drug addled has-been of the comic and in his place the athletic Sean, besting the villains in both hand-to-hand and armed combat.
Such deviances don’t make it a bad film though, what does is a script aimed at the under twelve’s. Why God only knows, because I doubt you’ll find many cinema going kids who know who Allan Quatermain, Captain Nemo, Mina Harker, Dorian Gray or Dr. Henry Jekyll and Mr Edward Hyde are (even from Moore’s comic which hardly has much appeal for kids).
