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
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