The League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen is a
chaotic mess, but it starts out oh, so elegantly and oh, so
promisingly. An aged Allan Quatermain (Sean Connery), the explorer
hero of several Conan Doyle adventures, is lured (or blown, as in
"explosive") out of retirement in Kenya, goes to London,
and is led into a secret chamber (with a Freemason symbol on the
door) to help avert a possible world war in the year 1899 by meeting
with an intelligence operative chief who introduces himself as
"M" (and is played by Richard Roxburgh).
Quatermain's mission, should he
choose to accept it, is to become part of a special team that is a
sort of Victorian Justice League- -- Captain Nemo (Naseeruddin
Shah), in East Indian attire and with the "Nautilus"
parked outside (the submarine's the best thing in the film -- a
gigantic silver prow, with an interior done in ivory and white and
designed like a maharajah's palace); a "gentleman thief"
(Tony Curran) who stole the formula from H.G. Wells' Invisible Man
and is now invisible himself; Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend, who hits
just the right sultry note of a true sensualist), recruited for his
ability at immortality and for how he drapes himself over the
furniture; Mina Harker (Peta Wilson, who's the other best thing in
the picture -- she is a wow), wife of Jonathan Harker and herself an
accomplished chemist (her special abilities will remain a secret in
this review, though); and an American Secret Service agent (Shane
West) who's a crack shot and is named Tom Sawyer. They stop in
Paris, so the film can make a reference to a famous Edgar Allan Poe
story, and to pick up Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde, both of whom are
supposed to be played by Jason Flemyng, although the latter looks
more like a cross between the Hulk and a very angry Gary Busey.
Then, it's off to go up against a nemesis named the Fantom -- a
one-eyed silver mask hides his scarred face -- who's planning on
unleashing prototype military tanks and machine guns on the nations
of the world. There's a betrayal (not hard to figure out by whom), a
summit meeting in Venice during the annual carnival, and a trip to a
snowy castle that's been converted into a munitions plant and looks
like a nightmare version of an Industrial Age gas works.
But as soon as the first action scene hit, I wondered: why did they hired Stephen Norrington to direct? Norrington did Blade, which, after the first seven minutes, I found to be unwatchable, for the same reasons as here: Norrington puts the camera very close to the flivver and flurry, and then throws what he gets all together onto the screen and sees what sticks. After a while, a resigned feeling sets in as you give up on trying to figure out what you're supposed to be following or even looking at. The movie loses track of one of its main characters for a long stretch of time, and it can't keep its multiple plotlines straight when it reaches the home stretch, reducing everything to complete incoherence. The movie's ending also has the distinction of being the worst I can recall seeing since the awful tacked-on one -- done without Clive Barker's approval or participation -- to the 1990 film, Nightbreed.