The Mickey Mouse Club

Noel Vera

I haven't read Alan Moore's "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen"
(comic books are an expensive hobby), but I have read enough Moore
("Watchmen," "Miracleman," "V for Vendetta" among others) to guess
that whatever this is, it will probably be sophisticated and
literate, stuffed to the gills with moral ambiguity.

I thought my ignorance would be an asset; I thought I could watch
the movie with few preconceptions (other than that Moore is very
good), and perhaps give it a better break than did fans of the
original graphic novel, who reportedly mostly hated it.

No such luck.

"League" starts off promisingly enough: it's circa late 19th
century, and a series of attacks occur in places with enough
primitive machinery that the appearance of 20th century weapons--
tanks and automatic rifles, or at least Victorian approximations of
them--gives you a small tingle. Some supervillain named The Phantom
is threatening the world, and his extraordinary powers need to be
countered by a band of just-as-extraordinary champions.

Then, the process of recruitment: Allen Quatermain (Sean Connery,
also the film's producer), famous adventurer of H. Rider Haggard's
novels; Mina Harker (Peta Wilson), victim of Bram Stoker's legendary
vampire; Dorian Gray (Stewart Townsend, apparently channeling Johnny
Depp), Oscar Wilde's eponymous anti-hero; Dr. Jekyll (Jason
Flemyng), Robert Louis Stevenson's tormented scientist; Captain Nemo
(Naseeruddin Shah), a cheerier version of Jules Verne's submarine
captain; Rodney Skinner, an invisible man (Tony Curran)--THE
Invisible Man was unavailable due to copyright restrictions insisted
on by H.G. Wells' estate; and Tom Sawyer (Shane West), one of Mark
Twain's most popular characters--included by the filmmakers, or so I
hear, to appeal to the American audience.

That last bit of casting already gives you a strong hint that this
won't be an attempt to capture the spirit of Moore's graphic novel
so much as it'll be a big-budget special-effects superproduction,
with the required dumbing down (why waste a big budget on an
intelligent film?). Hence, the emphasis on automatic gunfire, huge
explosions (at a time when explosion were probably restricted to
coal mines, naval battles, and the rare volcanic eruption), CGI
creature battles, even a car chase through the avenues of Venice
(WHAT avenues? Venice's rare pavement is mostly crooked alleys and
dead ends--any car crazy enough to drive through it would quickly
end up in a canal). Moore, for all I know, may have all those things
in his book, but he probably threw them in as little detail, meant
to confirm his revisionist take on classic literature, and not usurp
the primacy of the main story itself.

The story itself is complex yet strangely uninvolving, maybe because
the protagonists are as flat as, well, comic-book characters--
something Moore's characters (though they do appear in comic books)
can never be accused of being (the ones that I'm familiar with,
anyway). Mina bickers with Oscar Wilde; nobody trusts the invisible
man; Dr. Jekyll looks perennially depressed; Captain Nemo seems
uncharacteristically optimistic (I miss the dark, brooding figure of
Verne's novels), and consequently shallow.

It's all meant to be colorful fun, but neither Norrington nor his
cast nor James Dale Robinson's script ever capture the sense that
what you're looking at are the iconoclasts of the late 19th century,
observers of the waning Victorian age looking at that age's flaws
and prejudices and unspoken assumptions from a unique vantage point,
the outside--these people look and sound like your standard-issue X-
Men, only with a more flowery vocabulary. Connery's Quatermain in
particular seems indistinguishable from almost every other confident
iconoclast he's played since winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar
for "The Untouchables" (he was just as smugly arrogant in Philip
Kaufman's "Rising Sun," but there you weren't sure to which side he
so confidently belonged--the film had a beautiful ambiguity, and a
stylish sense of menace).

Even from the point of view of a special-effects
extravaganza, "League" falls short--Norrington, as he so abundantly
demonstrated in "Blade," has little feel for evoking wonder with CGI
effects (who does, nowadays?). His Nautilus is a silver-sabrelike
beauty, if implausibly large--it should be plowing huge furrows up
and down the canals of Venice, not sneaking through them--and his
Mr. Hyde is more entertainingly monstrous than Ang Lee's gamma-ray
version, but everything and everyone else feels like they never
really left the drawing board. His action scenes are indifferently
filmed and incoherently edited (they look as if Mr. Hyde had spliced
them together), his visual style is as subtle as a music video's (as
in: none), and his storytelling is clunky and graceless, which
doesn't help clarify the already complicated plot.

2003 has not been a good year for summer movies, much less summer
comic-book movies: "The Matrix Reloaded" was a bore, a loud, large-
caliber firefight with time out for interminable philosophy
lectures; "Bad Boys 2" was just loud and large-caliber (and, at one
hundred forty plus minutes, very long); "Spy Kids 3-D" was okay,
hardly memorable; "X-Men 2" was also okay, barely
serviceable; "Pirates of the Caribbean" would be a slog if it wasn't
for Johnny Depp doing his impression of the late Katherine
Hepburn; "Terminator 3" is actually okay, solidly made if uninspired
(and chock full of those unfortunate CGI effects). Of the summer
movies I've seen this year, the best of a poor lot would be Andrew
Davis' quirky "Holes," with its refreshingly minimum amount of
special effects (there's some, mind you, but not as much as most)
and emphasis on characterization, and Pixar's "Finding Nemo" with
the charming chemistry between Ellen Degeneres and Albert Brooks as
lead seafood (irrelevant note: I kept feeling for the character
Bruce in the picture: everyone but everyone looked delicious).
Otherwise--nada, nothing, just pure bottom-feeding; "League" only
helped scrape into the muck an extra inch deeper.

(First published in Businessworld, 8.15.03)

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