Thursday, July 10, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Film: Victorians' secrets

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a glib, formulaic action flick

By Jeannette Catsoulis

Squinting through the sights of the rifle he fondly calls Matilda, Allan Quatermain (Sean Connery) fires and misses. Irritated, he dons a pair of spectacles and this time hits his fleeing target. "I hate getting old," he grumbles.

No more than we hate watching him do so. At 72, one would expect the desire to play a superhero--in common with other desires requiring an elevated heart rate--would be waning rather than waxing. Yet here he is, leaping and fighting and making a godawful fool of himself in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a picture that inspires adjectives as antiquated as its protagonists.

It's 1899, and armor-plated Germans, led by the diabolical Fantom (sample line: "I want the world!"), have breached the Bank of England. Pried from cozy retirement in the Britannia Club in Nairobi, Quatermain is recruited to head a group of fictional anti-heroes whose perverse abilities will hopefully avert the end of the world: the Invisible Man (Tony Curran, by way of H.G. Wells rather than Ralph Ellison), Captain Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah), Mina Harker (Peta Wilson), Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend), Dr. Jekyll (Jason Flemyng) and Tom Sawyer (Shane West).

As envisioned by comic book legend Alan Moore, the notion of resurrecting the famously tormented characters of Wilde and Stoker, Stevenson and Verne has an intriguing subversiveness that is sadly unexplored. Rife with the narrative possibilities of inner demons (Jekyll and his Hyde, Allan and his dead son), the movie might have followed the example of its literary progenitors and taken more than superficial stabs at the consequences of both unregulated science and uncontrolled imperialism. Instead, all that's interesting is trampled beneath the hooves of standard action-adventure formula, glib and shallow and heavy with overdesigned armature.

Though overlooked in the title, the film's sole extraordinary woman is a blood-slurping vampire whose history with Dorian Gray has a twisted and fascinating eroticism. "I'm complicated," he pouts, one Immortal to another. She eyes his neck hungrily. Now that's a film I want to see.