Unheroic
Comic book League of Extraordinary Gentlemen gets lousy screen adaptation
Fans of writer Alan Moore’s comic book series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen knew early on that the movie adaptation would prove problematic. Not because of screenwriter James Robinson, whose work on the superhero comic Starman was some of the best of its kind in the late ’90s, or because of director Stephen Norrington, who made the sickeningly effective vampire superhero flick Blade, but because of the movie’s marketing campaign, which buried the premise.
Moore and artist Kevin O’Neill devised The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as a gimmicky cross between turn-of-the-century literature and Silver Age superheroes, with fictional folk like Allan Quartermain, The Invisible Man, Captain Nemo, Dracula hunter Mina Murray, and Dr. Jekyll (with Mr. Hyde, of course) banding together, Avengers-style, to save the British empire. The movie version adds Dorian Gray and Tom Sawyer, but the studio apparently has so little faith in American moviegoers’ knowledge of these characters that the trailer neglects to mention more than a couple of them by name—really only Quartermain, who may be the least immediately recognizable hero, played by above-the-title star Sean Connery.
Unlike the comics, which embrace outlandishness and (in typical Moore fashion) find soul, meaning and a ripping good yarn in the picked-over bones of stock figures, the movie seems callously designed to make a silly concept palatable to a mainstream audience, and it’s lousy with desperation. Norrington and Robinson load up on plot and overly explosive special effects sequences—they can’t even shoot a seagoing skeet session without resorting to CGI—while chugging madly to rubble-strewn slugfests devoid of any feeling for what makes the combatants unique. The grizzled, somewhat tortured figures that Moore revealed disappear, replaced by generic punchers and shooters who are anything but extraordinary.
—Noel Murray
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