Originally released July 11, 2003:

This movie is certifiably insane. While a very literary X-Men seems like a great idea, what exactly does Tom Sawyer bring to the table? What, is he going to convince the bad guys to white wash a fence? And yet, this highly operatic bombast almost succeeds on its sheer level of lunacy, like when you realize you’re watching Sawyer get a crush on a vampire on a giant underwater submarine that’s so big it has end tables and vases in its hallways. Still, the handling of Jekyll/Hyde here is what Hulk should have been like. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen almost works, but its falls apart amidst shabby special effects, outlandish plotting, and very wooden dialogue. The director doesn’t make it any easier to follow, trumping his action sequences with rapid fire edits. Ah well, my bafflement was more entertaining.

Nate’s Grade: C

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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a fascinating film in that it cannot be good but it also cannot be bad; it exists upon an extraordinary plane where few movies ever transpire, not so-bad-it’s-good but an altogether different realm, where it would be impossible to be good while also impossible for it to be bad. It’s a bizarre yet fascinating contraption of a movie, a literary X-Men that plays to the lowest common denominator, making awe-inspiring mistakes as it careens to a bombast that approaches self-parody but lacks self-awareness to properly execute. I do not regret watching this again in 2023 but I cannot in good conscience recommend that you, dear reader, watch it, and yet I still want every one of you to.

It began as an adaptation of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s graphic novel which was itself a combination of high art (classic literature) and popular culture (super hero team-up), and from there that high-art mashup got even more… mashy… as it made its way through the Hollywood studio system to become a big, dumb summer blockbuster. You can see the appeal to the studio bigwigs, forming their own superhero team but from recognizable literary characters, and it’s fun to see these classic characters interact as well as slotted into superhero archetypes, though I’m sure there are a few academics that consider this a debasing of canonical literary figures. Jekyll and Hyde (Jason Felmyng) makes obvious sense as the Hulk of the group. Captain Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah) works as the tech-savvy Tony Stark. The immortal Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend) is practically the group’s erudite Wolverine. I guess Mina Harker (Petra Wilson) would be this group’s Blade. There is a certain intellectual thrill watching classic characters in a new setting that relies upon them to work together and utilize their own special powers, highlighting that we’ve had superheroes long before the halcyon of the twentieth century.

Almost every artistic decision feels designed to fully baffle you if you think about it long enough, and while shattering any sense of reality, I can almost begrudgingly respect this creative license to simply go all out with the absurdity. This high/low combination makes every scene utterly ridiculous while also being fascinating. Nemo’s fantastical Nautilus sub is designed like a giant straight razor, yet the bustling interiors are so stately, including lengthy hallways with end tables and vases, a decorative motif that makes absolutely no sense on a submersible. There is a literal scene where Allen Quartermain (Sean Connery) teaches Tom Sawyer (Shane West in a terrible haircut) how to shoot better when the guy already shoots plenty good and Tom, completely oblivious, asks, “Did you teach your son to shoot like this?” But why would Tom ask that, in this moment, unless to touch upon the fact that Quartermain’s son is dead, a fact that we the audience already know? There are hidden bombs placed that will be triggered by a hidden frequency when played on a record, and somehow every corner of this floating city of a sub will hear this one record player in one room? Why even record a triggering device and have it linked to the villains explaining their plan? Why would you need to steal Da Vinci’s architectural plans for Venice when, I’m going out on a limb here, there are more accessible and modern city infrastructure plans in 1899 Venice?

So much of the character dynamics and characterization are condensed to their formula necessity. Our reluctant lead gets a surrogate son to try and mentor. Quartermain hates the British government because he blames them for his son’s death, but it’s not like he’s abandoned the luxuries of colonialism while retiring in Kenya. The invisible man (Tony Curran) gets an opportunity to prove that a criminal can reform and be counted upon. Jekyll and Hyde learn to work together rather than fighting for dominance. Mina Harker is a powerful vampire and yet her role is to be a possible love interest to the young kid on the team and to seek vengeance on her other lover, placing her entire character arcs as past romantic partner and future partner. Look at the poster art and you’ll see they had to make extra allowance to squeeze in her vampire cleavage, her real feature as far as the movie is concerned. You have a vampire on your team and the movie simply treats her as a walking set of boobs. I suppose Tom Sawyer is meant to serve as our entry point into this world as the rookie, but every character on the team is a rookie, so having an even bigger novice seems superfluous as they’re bringing the League back together, except it’s revealed later there was NEVER any League of the past, which means the bad guy literally commissioned oil paintings of past member combinations that never existed just to sell a false history that never amounted to anything (again, pick at any detail and the entire reality unravels). Even the villain’s plot is needlessly convoluted and also astonishingly simplistic: create conflict, sell arms, get money. The secondary scheme could have been accomplished by just asking each of the League members to sit for a blood test. You didn’t need to destroy Venice for this.

The colossal miscalculations extend beyond the screenplay. This movie essentially ended the career of Connery and its director, Stephen Norrington (Blade). The story goes that Connery was offered the part of Morpheus but turned it down because he didn’t understand The Matrix, and he was offered the role of Gandalf but turned it down because he didn’t understand The Lord of the Rings, and after both became cultural phenoms, Connery was determined not to let his own questions stand in the way of what could be the next sci-fi/fantasy blockbuster. Those notable “no”s lead him to regrettably saying “yes” to this silly movie, and then he was done. In the seventeen years before his death in 2020, Connery only gave a handful of vocal performances, the last one for 2012’s Sir Billie, the first CGI-animated feature from Scotland, and oh is it bad. Norrington and Connery didn’t get along during the production and at one point the director tried to goad Connery into punching him in the face. Norrington refused to make another studio movie and has gone back to his makeup and special effects background for film productions, including providing creature effects for Feast and Exorcist: The Beginning. The fact that Connery’s character dies but they end on his possible resurrection, for a possible sequel never to come, is especially hilarious knowing Connery and Norrington elected to quit their jobs after this.

At some point, you just give into the movie and try and ride its absurdist wavelength. The climax involves an assault on a giant munitions compound making… metal-cased men? Like armor? Don’t we already have that? The movie’s rules posit that the invisible man is only truly invisible when he’s fully naked, and the movie makes sure you understand this at several points, so having a climactic battle in a frigid mountain compound just makes you worry that he’s going to be blue and invisible. I love that Dorian Gray’s weakness, his infamous supernatural doppelganger painting, isn’t like locked in some impenetrable fortress but just something he carries with him, like Superman keeping kryptonite in his travel bag. I also groaned when, while fighting Mina, he stakes her to his bed and blithely says, “I always wanted to nail you one more time.” Again, simply amazing and flabbergasting. Why do we have one member of the team that shoots good when we already have another member of the team who already shoots good? I would have laughed out loud had the filmmakers actually resorted to Tom Sawyer tricking the minions of evil to white wash a fence instead of threatening the new world order. There are no standout action sequences, the special effects can be rather dodgy for its budget, and the editing is jumbled to likely mask the absence of good action choreography, but what this movie has, in rich abundance, is lunacy, a plethora of ridiculous plot elements to digest.

In 2003, I didn’t have many words to say about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen but all of them are correct and still accurate twenty years later. This is a movie that almost works on its own level of schlocky absurdity, and yet it could never work with this approach, but it’s littered with bizarre, miscalculated ideas and plot elements that make it all the more fascinating, like a car crash of a painting. They don’t really make movies quite often on the scale of disaster that is League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and we all benefit by examining how something like this slipped through, to remind us all of the folly of man and the strive to do better. Somebody dissect this like a case study for our benefit as a species.

Re-View Grade: C-