The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

It might be a stretch to call this a superhero movie, but it is based on a graphic novel published by DC (written by Alan Moore), and it's a movie I've always secretly wanted to see, even though it sucks. The basic premise of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is simple. It takes a bunch of public domain characters from 19th century literature, pits them together, and sends them on adventures. It is also partly responsible for the steam punk craze that seems to continue to grow each year. Now, I haven't read Alan Moore's original work yet, so I can only compare this movie to my personal imagination and expectations.

This movie is notable for being Sean Connery's last. He was paid $17 million, given Executive Producer credits, and also got into fights with director Stephen Norrington. Norrington hasn't directed very many films, but one of them was Blade, which I hated. So I can easily see how Connery would be frustrated with him to the point of retiring from the business altogether after filming this mess. Anyway, Connery, by far the most well-known actor, ironically plays the least-known character, Allan Quatermain. I guess Quatermain was popular in England back in the day. Like, way back in the day. He was a big game hunter in Africa, back when reading stories about a guy hunting lions was the coolest thing imaginable. This movie added a supernatural aspect to Quatermain, saying a witch doctor blessed him to never die in Africa. Since Connery demanded so much money, Fox didn't have the budget to add any other big names. So I'll just dive into my summary/review and introduce the characters as they appear in the movie.

The movie got off to a very weird start. It's 1899, and the terrorist known as the Phantom is robbing a bank. Not for money, but for the blueprints for Venice. And to accomplish this robbery, he uses one of the first tanks. As it barrels down the road in London, the police are quite baffled by its appearance. One officer stands directly in front of it and repeatedly orders it to halt. The others run out of the way, but he remains stalwart, only to be run over by the tank. It's an exact repeat of the steamroller scene in the first Austin Powers movie, only this wasn't supposed to be funny. What's even more perplexing about this scene is that Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery came out in 1997, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen came out in 2003. Did they think we'd forget that hilarious scene from six years earlier?

So as the opening scene so painfully established, this is a very juvenile film. Which is odd, considering the target audience was likely high schoolers who had actually read a few of the books represented in this movie. But these "sophisticated" teenagers (of which I counted myself as one) were subjected to fight scene after fight scene that were more befitting a 7-year-old than a 17-year-old. Case in point, the first fight for Quatermain. A British official journeys to Africa to recruit the legendary hunter to stop the Phantom from igniting a world war. Quatermain is immediately attacked by the Phantom's men, and this fight involves way too much furniture for my liking. He even kills a guy by shoving a painting into his face and pushing him into a rhino's horn. Seriously? How can such a cheesy movie take itself so seriously?

So anyway, Quatermain journeys to London to meet with the mysterious man named M, who is recruiting the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. We first meet Captain Nemo, who is an Indian pirate with advanced technology, including his massive submarine, the Nautilus. He has a large crew of pirates who occasionally help out in a fight, but mostly just run the ship. Despite providing the most to the team, Nemo is not the leader, nor is he very interesting. They tried to spice him up by making him an expert fencer, martial artist, and a man who worships the Indian god of death. But none of those things helped. He is just a very boring character.

Up next is the Invisible Man, who is constantly naked the whole movie. He occasionally puts on an overcoat, but never pants or shoes. That really bugs me. He would freeze and get injured and overall be incredibly uncomfortable. The filmmakers also seemed to have a hard time deciding what to do with him, as he literally disappeared for half the movie.

We next meet Mina Harker, who is from Bram Stoker's Dracula. In the book, her husband is the first one to meet Dracula and recognize him as a vampire. In the movie, Mina's husband is long dead, and she is a vampire, even though she wasn't in the book or the graphic novel. Unlike most vampires, who are cursed by their powers, Mina doesn't appear to suffer from any side effects. There's no mention of the sun killing her, or garlic, or anything. She just randomly bites somebody's neck or flies around in a cloud of bad-CGI bats. Honestly, the most interesting thing about her is that she used to be Dorian Gray's girlfriend.

Dorian Gray is from an old short story about a man who remains the same age while a painting of him ages and reflects all the sins he's committed. The story ends with him confessing his sins and stabbing the painting himself. The injury he performs to the painting reflects on himself and he finally dies. In the movie, they simplified it by saying that once he looks at the painting, he dies. And he's quite concerned because someone has stolen that painting.

The next character to join the team was actually a studio mandate. They decided that this cast needed someone younger and American to keep audiences interested. So they brought in Tom Sawyer, who's now a young adult and member of the U.S. Secret Service. Turns out the studio was right. Sawyer is probably the most entertaining member of the team, and he adds some depth to Quatermain's character. Apparently Quatermain's son was killed in combat and he blames himself for not training him. But Sawyer reminds him of his son, and they have a couple of nice moments together.

The last member of the team is Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, who Quatermain and Sawyer need to hunt down in Paris. In the original story by Robert Louis Stevenson, Mr. Hyde was not a giant hulking monster. He was just a vicious, out-of-control man that killed for pleasure. But as in most movies, this version of Mr. Hyde is a giant, hulking monster. And although they tried to initially make a big deal of how dangerous he is, he never actually does anything bad. He immediately agrees to join the team when they say they'll take him back to London, and he only ever helps them throughout the movie. He's in complete control the whole time, which makes him terribly boring for me. He's very much like the Hulk in The Avengers. I also wasn't a fan of his transformations. They were always very jerky because they were trying to hide that they were adding or taking off parts of his costume. You'd think they would've used some CGI to smooth out the transformations, but I guess Sean Connery's salary ate too much out of the special effect budget.

So now that the team is finally assembled, they all board Nemo's sub to head to Venice to save it from the Phantom, who unfortunately is almost nothing like the Phantom of the Opera. Missed opportunity. Anyway, Dr. Jekyll discovers that someone stole one of his Mr. Hyde vials, and everybody instantly blames the Invisible Man. And this is where he completely disappears from the movie, and we don't even mention him again until the end.

Once they're in Venice, they need to race ahead to stop a bomb, so Tom Sawyer jumps in Nemo's brand new "auto-mobile" and instantly knows how to drive it like a race car, even though they made a big deal of the fact that no one had even seen or heard of a car before. Anyway, we get a lot of stupid fighting, and then Quatermain learns that the Phantom is actually M. And we see that the spy is actually Dorian Gray, and he escapes as soon as everybody else learns it.

Conveniently, Dorian left behind a phonograph recording detailing his plot. Confusingly, the movie showed Dorian and M making this recording in a scratchy black-and-white video. But our heroes weren't given a video to watch, just audio to listen to. So why did the bad guys pose dramatically and look directly into a non-existent camera when they recorded this? Anyway, they explain that the whole League and attack on Venice was just a ruse to acquire samples from them. M is creating a super army of his own, so he sent Dorian to steal blueprints of Nemo's sub, grab a bit of the Invisible Man's skin, get some of Mina's blood, and steal some of the Mr. Hyde formula. The movie painstakingly shows us each and every moment this occurred, spelling things out so simply that even a 5-year-old could follow it.

This brings me to another fundamental complaint of the movie. Every single scene and piece of dialogue in the first half of the movie is obvious, blatant foreshadowing for the second half. It is nice to have everything link together nicely, but this was too nice. I felt like I was being babied, and nothing in the movie felt organic. It was all very predictable and stale. This hearkens back to the movie's attempt to appeal to a younger audience, even though most kids under the age of 10 would have no interest in watching this movie since they've never heard of half of the characters.

So yeah, I'll just skip to the end now. Our heroes track the bad guys to M's secret castle in Russia, and the Invisible Man conveniently returns at the end, saying he knew no one would believe he wasn't the spy, so he just kept quiet, following everybody around in the nude. We then jump in to the epic final battle. Mr. Hyde has to fight a giant red Mr. Hyde monster that looks pretty fake, and the Invisible Man has to fight another guy who turned himself invisible. Mina, however, doesn't have any vampires to fight, so she takes on Dorian Gray, who was only helping M because he had his painting. The Mina/Dorian fight is naturally quite boring, and she ultimately defeats him by forcing him to look at his painting. In some of the worst CGI of the movie, Dorian rapidly ages and turns to dust. For inspiration, this movie should have looked back at an earlier Sean Connery movie, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which did the exact same trick much more convincingly without the aid of advanced CGI.

Quatermain naturally gets to fight M at the end, and we learn that M is really James Moriarty, which means absolutely nothing in this movie. There was no mention of him or Sherlock Holmes earlier, so I really didn't see the point besides dropping another name from 19th century literature. Tom Sawyer delivers the killing blow to Moriarty, but Quatermain also died in the fight, so they bury him in Africa. As the heroes walk away from his grave, a witch doctor approaches it, does a little dance, and conjures a lightning bolt. And the movie ends.

Fox was hoping they'd be able to start a franchise with this movie, so they very carefully set up Sean Connery's death to cover all their bases. If he wanted to come back for a sequel, they could have said the witch doctor revived him. If he didn't, they could have said he remained dead. Or if he only wanted to return for a cameo they could have still revived him but kept him in Africa. Well, it turns out that Fox didn't need to worry about any of that. The movie had a budget of $78 million and made $179 million, which wasn't quite enough to overcome all the negative reviews to justify a sequel. So Sean Connery retired, and since he was the main draw for this movie, nobody was interested in watching or even making another movie without Connery.

I honestly don't know if the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen could be a good movie. But I do know that this movie really sucked, and I hope nobody tries to do a remake for a long time. There are a lot of other better superheroes out there that deserve to have movies made. So let's keep these literary characters in the pages of actual literature for now.

Final score: 0

Hulk

I've been avoiding this movie for a solid decade. But now, I've finally seen 2003's Hulk, and while it still is a terrible movie, it isn't as bad as I thought it'd be. Ang Lee, of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fame, was the director, Eric Bana was Bruce Banner, Jennifer Connelly his girlfriend, Betty Ross, Sam Elliott her dad, General Ross, and Nick Nolte was the villain of this movie, Bruce's dad, David Banner. Universal held the rights to this movie — they even built a massive Hulk roller coaster in Florida — but it took them nearly 15 years to get the movie started. They went through tons of different scripts, including a comedy with Jim Carrey, and even the great J.J. Abrams was involved at one point. When they finally settled on the direction they wanted to go, Edward Norton was the lead candidate to play Banner, but he was disappointed with the script. Luckily, he did return for the superior sequel/reboot.

At the end of the day, Universal poured $137 million into this movie, plus tons and tons of money on advertising. I remember Hulk stuff being everywhere — annoyingly so. Universal even paid for a big commercial during the Super Bowl, but the special effects weren't ready, and it looked like crap. Even though this was 2003, we already had the Star Wars prequels, Spider-Man, X-Men, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, so we had developed pretty high standards for special effects. However, the excitement to see the Hulk on the big screen was still very high, and it opened to a very large weekend. But then word of mouth instantly killed the movie, and it set a record for having the largest drop ever from the opening weekend. Ultimately, Hulk did earn more than $245 million, but Universal was expecting a lot more from all their advertising dollars spent. Plus, the fans — casual and hardcore — absolutely hated this movie, prompting Universal to give the rights back to Marvel. So now that the background's out of the way, let's head into the synopsis/review to see just how bad Hulk was.

The opening credits were actually pretty cool. They started in the 1960s, with David Banner conducting experiments on regeneration qualities. He starts with jellyfish, starfish and sea cucumbers, eventually working his way up to more complex animals like lizards and even monkeys. It's a really neat storytelling device that crams in a lot of information if you pay attention. We also get a pretty fun theme by Danny Elfman, but unfortunately, it seemed that Ang Lee didn't care for Elfman's music, as at least 50 percent of this movie has no music whatsoever.

So anyway, David Banner is a scientist working on a military base, and he thinks he's found a breakthrough in his regeneration formula. But his superior, Sam Ross, sees how risky it is, and he prevents Banner from testing it on humans. So, like all good mad scientists, Banner naturally tries it on himself, but nothing happens to him. Later, his wife becomes pregnant, and gives birth to a son, Bruce. Whenever little Bruce gets angry, parts of him turn a slight shade of grayish green. David realizes that his serum passed on to his son, and he begins to try to find an antidote for Bruce. When Bruce is 4 years old, Ross finds David still working on the forbidden research, and he officially shuts him down this time. David snaps, causing an explosion at his lab, runs home, has a heated argument with his wife, then the screen cuts black.

So that's our new origin for the Hulk … mostly. Surprisingly, I'm not too bothered by it at this point in the movie. I mean, originally in the comics, Bruce Banner only turned into the Hulk at night — it had nothing to do with anger. So I'm alright with a few tweaks, even if this is a bit overly-complicated. I suppose I should also take this moment to address the much-derided split-screen effect Ang Lee used constantly in this movie. I suppose the desire was to make the movie feel more like a comic book, which I believe is a terrible mistake. Comics should be comics and movies should be movies. Take the same stories and characters, but don't try to re-create the experience of seeing multiple panels of action on each page. Having said that, there were a few moments where the split-screen trick was used to good effect — to actually show multiple things at once, or to symbolically illustrate emotional distance between characters. But most of the time, the split-screens simply showed the exact same action from a slightly different angle. That's when it became really annoying.

Let's head back to the movie, which has now skipped ahead 30 years to Bruce Banner arriving at his work at a fancy lab. This is where we get our Stan Lee cameo, who is a security guard with Lou Ferringo, the Hulk from '70s TV show. Sadly, this unfunny scene is the closest thing this movie ever comes to any sort of comedy. There is not a drop of humor in this whole film, and it suffers because of it. Anyway, Bruce is still working with his ex-girlfriend, Betty Ross, and some unnamed, unimportant assistant. I'm not sure why they stressed the fact that Betty and Bruce were exes, when it really didn't seem to affect the story at all. As for Betty, I can't stand her one bit. She is cold, emotionless, and constantly whispering. This movie was so, so quiet, with way too many scenes of people just sitting around whispering at each other.

There is one nice spot in the film when Daniel Dae Kim, from "Lost," appears. He's a soldier named Kim (so I guess he starred as himself?), but only shows up for one scene. I'm not saying he would have saved this movie, but it would have been nice to see more of him. Anyway, I'd better try to get back to this plot, but it's really hard to do, since it jumps around so much with flashbacks, dreams, and dreams in flashbacks. No joke. At one point, Bruce is sadly looking at picture of him and Betty, and he remembers a time when she told him about a dream she had that was half-memory. When she was 2, living on the same military base as Bruce, her dad was urgently called away after David Banner blew up the lab. Then Betty's early memory shifts into a dream when an adult Bruce comes in to protect her, but then starts choking her. And the movie is full of crap like that. Ang Lee puts a lot of stock in dreams, but I could have done without them. They just bogged everything down.

We finally get to the big "accident" scene, and this is where the origin story starts to unravel a bit. The unnamed assistant is stuck in the lab, and it about to be bombarded with gamma rays! Luckily, the heroic Bruce steps in from of him to absorb the blast of radiation. Umm … wouldn't that go right through him? Anyway, the problem with this scene is that it's anti-climatic. This was supposed to be the big event that triggered his transformation. But we've already spent half an hour meticulously explaining that the Hulk was already inside Banner. So what was the point of the big accident? It doesn't even trigger the initial transformation. We just skip to him in a hospital bed, saying how good he feels. How boring.

That night, the mysterious custodian comes to visit Bruce and reveals himself as — shocker! — his dad! He said he'd been locked away for 30 years, but now he's out and he's been tracking Bruce because of the serum in him. Bruce yells at him, and he goes away. The next morning, a completely worthless character named Talbot apparently shuts down Bruce's research. Or something like that. I don't really care. I guess Talbot is some corrupt military contractor that wants the regeneration serum that Bruce and Betty happened to be working on. Anyway, whatever he did, it must have been pretty devastating to Bruce, because it caused his first transformation into the Hulk. This happens at the 41-minute mark of the movie (way too long for my taste) and it occurred in an empty lab at night. So all he does is smash up some equipment, then runs to Betty's home and goes to sleep. What should have been an extremely powerful moment in the film ended up rather boring. Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if we didn't have to wait so long for it.

Now I need to discuss the Hulk himself. He is the primary special effect in this movie, and its entire success is dependent on getting him right. But they didn't. He looks pretty fake. What really messes him up is his very bright shade of green. This whole movie is very dark, drab and serious. All the colors, actors, and scenery are muted and plain. Then suddenly this enormous, almost-neon green thing appears and dominates the screen for the second half of the movie. It just felt so out of place. Almost like the Hulk ruined this movie called Hulk. They really should have made him a darker shade of green and mixed some gray in with him, like they eventually did in The Incredible Hulk. But that would've only helped so much. The Hulk only looked somewhat realistic when they did a closeup on his sad face. The rest of the time, it didn't feel like he was interacting with the other characters and scenery — just this big floating green blob. Another interesting thing they added was making him literally grow larger the angrier he got. I used to like this concept as a kid, but I think I've kind of grown out of it now, especially after seeing how ridiculous it looked in this movie. The only thing worse than a 10-foot-tall cheesy-looking Hulk is a 20-foot-tall cheesy-looking Hulk. In summation, you could throw out every other aspect of this movie, and pin everything on the Hulk. The Hulk sucked, so the movie sucked.

Back to our crappy film, Bruce awakens from his first transformation at Betty's house. She tells him that their lab was destroyed and she asks where he was last night. He says, "I had the most vivid dream. It was like I was being born again. Coming up for air." OK … that's a pretty good description of what it feels like to be the Hulk, but that doesn't answer the question. Nor does it sound like a very vivid dream. I think the word vivid requires some details with it. Anyway, General Ross shows up to interrupt this awkward breakfast scene, and he immediately starts grilling Bruce about where his dad is. He also implies about some tragedy from when Bruce was 4, but he doesn't elaborate. If Ross was smart enough to track down Bruce Banner, then why couldn't he find David Banner? This only looks worse, when Betty easily tracks down David.

This is where Ang Lee just stops caring about characters' motives, personalities, and logic. He just has people do bad things for the sake of being bad in order to create conflict and an excuse for Bruce to turn into the Hulk again. Betty has a very boring and awkward whispering conversation with David, and he steals her scarf to give to his dogs. David then calls Bruce to tell him that he's given his dogs the serum and has sent them out to kill Betty. Why? Why does he want to kill her and why does he bother telling Bruce this? Talbot then visits Bruce in his home and starts beating the crap out of him for no reason. Maybe he said why, something about government contracts, I guess, I don't know or care, but it definitely didn't feel like something worth physically assaulting someone over. Naturally, this causes Bruce to turn into the Hulk, and he does enough damage to Talbot to kill him, but he miraculously survives. Hulk then runs to Betty's aid, and fights three very fake-looking dogs. And one of the dogs is a poodle. I can imagine someone asking Ang Lee why one of the dogs had to be a poodle, and him answering, "Shut up! That's why!"

The whole dog fight is incredibly stupid for three reasons. One, the dogs looked terrible. CGI at its worst. Two, Betty was "trapped" in her truck, couldn't start the engine, but then did, then decided to turn it off and stay there to watch this 15-foot-tall green giant fight three monstrous dogs. At this point, Betty doesn't know the Hulk is Bruce. So why is she staying? Run! Run far away from these monsters! And the third reason this fight sucked ties into the first reason. Whenever the Hulk killed one of the dogs, it instantly evaporated into a cloud of green smoke. This isn't a video game! … Or is it? If it is, it reminds me a lot of those Metal Gear Solid games with boring movies of everybody sitting around and talking for over an hour.

So now the movie has fallen past the point of no return. It's hit rock bottom and can't possibly get any worse, although it certainly does try. Betty betrays Bruce and turns him in to her dad, who takes him to a super-secure facility at the Salt Flats. For some reason, Talbot is put in charge, and he wants to turn Bruce into the Hulk so he can extract a sample from him. He initially says that he doesn't care if Bruce dies, because he can then acquire his sample through the autopsy. But then once the Hulk is running loose through the halls, he starts screaming at everybody to use nonlethal weapons so he can extract his sample. He momentarily stops the Hulk with some foam, and tries to personally get his "sample" by attempting to drill into the Hulk's eyeball, I guess. But this makes Hulk mad, and he breaks out of the foam, so Talbot grabs a rocket launcher to shoot at the Hulk. What happened to nonlethals? Anyway, the rocket shell bounces off the Hulk's chest and explodes behind Talbot in one of the weirdest movie deaths I've seen. He leapt into the front of the frame, which froze, cut him out like a bad Photoshop job, then condensed the image to a comic book panel. I guess really stupid characters deserve really stupid deaths.

So with Talbot's death, Ross is back in charge, and he decides to lure the Hulk outside, because, you know, he didn't want Hulk to smash up his secret Salt Flats lab — just all the innocent people out in the world. Ross personally gets in a helicopter and chases the Hulk around a scenic tour of the most famous national parks in Utah, including Delicate Arch. Apparently Ang Lee was banking on the fact that most people in the world aren't very familiar with Utah's geography, and would't notice that Hulk, the helicopters, and the tanks traveled 500 miles in two seconds.

Now, this is probably the best part of the movie — it's certainly what we've wanted all along — the Hulk to smash up some tanks. But it was hurt by the geography errors and the stupid fact that the Hulk doesn't kill anyone. They went to great lengths to show all the soldiers crawl out of the tanks or say they were fine over the radio when they clearly should have died. So ultimately, the only things the Hulk kills in this movie are the dogs, since Talbot kind of killed himself. I don't have a problem with the Hulk not killing, but when he performs actions violent enough to kill people, then they should be dead.

So anyway, Ross kind of stops the Hulk by blowing up priceless rock formations to bury him under. Naturally, this doesn't work, and Hulk suddenly shows up at the top of the Golden Gate Bridge. Fearing for Betty's safety, Ross quickly arrives there a moment later, since Utah and San Francisco are so close to each other. At one point, the Hulk performs his single act of heroism by jumping on a fighter jet so it doesn't crash into the bridge. The jet eventually shakes Hulk by flying up into the edge of the atmosphere, and it was a pretty neat scene. Finally, Betty gets the bright idea to show up to try to calm down the Hulk. So she instantly arrives, and the Hulk instantly turns back into Bruce.

At this point, I really wanted the movie to end. We've already hit the two-hour mark, and it felt much longer. But no, we still need to have one more confrontation with Bruce's dad. Since seeing the Hulk, David tried to replicate the experiment, but it instead gave him the ability to absorb materials he touches and turn his body into that material. Yeah, that makes sense, right? Anyway, he gets the bright idea to use his new powers to drain all the power from the Hulk. So he turns himself in to General Ross, contingent on him meeting Bruce in person. For some reason, Ross agrees to this request, and we get a very long, very boring scene of Bruce and David talking. David rants and raves forever about the corrupt nature of society, then in a moment of sheer lunacy, picks up a wire and bites into it. This turns him into a being of electricity. Conveniently, Bruce also turns into the Hulk, so these two can now fight. They kind of blast up into the clouds, and we only see quick still images of Hulk "fighting" his dad in the clouds. They then land on a bunch of rocks by a lake. David turns into some rocks for a bit, but then Hulk throws him in the lake. David then turns into water, and starts to drown the Hulk, trying to absorb his energy. Then the lake instantly freezes, and Betty Ross is conveniently on hand to explain to us that they're absorbing all the ambient energy. Of course! Why couldn't I see that!

Well, just when you thought things got weird enough, the Hulk says to his dad, "You want my power? You think you can handle it? Take it! Take it ALL!" And then David turns into a mushroom cloud(?) shouting, "YES! YES! NO! Take it back! Take it back! It won't stop!" Huh? Luckily, everything ends when Ross drops a nuke on them. And one year later, we see Bruce helping people in South America.

Well, that was … that. Ang Lee definitely had some good ideas, but I think he over-thought some stuff and under-thought some really important stuff. Luckily, there is another Hulk movie out there I can enjoy, so I can continue to ignore this film and pretend it doesn't exist like I have for the past 10 years.

Final score: 0