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).
Add to the witless script some bloated action sequences that lack any sense of urgency, woefully poor special effects (what were they thinking with that Mr Hyde Vs doppelganger fight at the end?) and such insipid performances that mangle some of literatures best loved creations into charisma free shadows of there true selves.
With Blade, Stephen Norrington made one of the better comic movies. With The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen he turned that on its head, making a bloated, shallow and very tedious film that didn’t know who its audience was and consequently didn’t get one.
The after effects of this movie still linger, Connery’s given up making films, having had such a dire experience working on it that even Spielberg and Lucas couldn’t tempt him back for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, while Norrington hasn’t directed a film since, instead doing some special effects work here and there. That could change though, as he reportedly signed to direct a remake of Clash of the Titans at the end of last year, it’s time for Ray Harryhausen fans to learn the meaning of fear…
