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Rating: 1 out of 5
Have you ever seen a film that you thought would be great only for it to be such a freakin dumpster fire that you regret watching it? The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is that movie. It’s a film that takes many OG books you probably did or didn’t read in class, throws them into a blender, and sees what happens. I’m talking about Dracula, 20000 Leagues Under the Sea, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Tom Sawyer, Phantom of the Opera, Dorian Gray, Invisible Man, Frankenstein, The Creature from the Blue Lagoon, Huck Finn, and so many others. Okay, maybe the last three weren’t in this film, but you get what I am saying. It had almost every OG superstar book character, and it was straight-up terrible. You might as well read all the books and not watch this film.
In this shit version of a film, in parallel Victorian Britain, a crazy-ass terrorist named Fantom is plotting for England and Germany to go to war. He takes a tank, attacks one place, and then blows up airships in another. England decides it must find the Fantom and bring him down. They recruit experienced adventurer Allan Quatermain (Connery) to put together a team of “extraordinary” people. During his recruitment turn, he recruits some of English Literature’s most significant characters, such as Dorian Gray (Townsend), Captain Nemo (Shah), Mina Karker (Wilson), the Invisible Man (Curran), Tom Sawyer (West) and the famous Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde (Flemyng). With these extraordinary members, they might be the world’s only hope.
This film has many issues, but the execution was off. Maybe everything was off. One of the problems is the story. I get you have an evil person trying to start a war between two countries that really go to war years later in real life. The film draws upon too many sources with characters, and it becomes muddled. Here are the works that this film took from: Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, H. Rider Haggard, Ian Fleming, Herman Melville, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe, Gaston Leroux, and Mark Twain. The film felt like it said fuck it, let’s make something out of all these books and get something. That is what the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is. It was the awful version of Marvel’s Avengers before the Avengers came out to play.
The story is like the Marvel Avengers but with famous OG book characters. The Fantom is a terrorist who wants to cause war between Britain and Germany (sounds familiar). The government recruits all these people that you’re like, okay, they didn’t have any superpowers in the books, but let’s roll with it. Mr. Hyde looks like the messed-up version of the Hulk. Allan Quartermain and Tom Sawyer shoot bullets like Deadshot. Mina Harker from Dracula is a vampire, and Captain Nemo has ninja-like moves. They go after the Fantom, who turns out to be Dr. Moriarty, and shit gets confusing quickly and all over the place.
I know I am rambling, but it’s hard to figure out what was happening in this film because you are so confused about what the characters are doing. There is a scene in Venice where Nemo has a freakin car in 1899 which is fine because the car was invented in 1886, but dude had like an unbreakable Dodge Charger that was silver. It was insane and driving through the crumbling streets of Venice. You had bullets flying all over the place. Mina freakin turns into bats and goes HAM. Dorian Gray does something. Mr. Hyde is acting crazy. It was a shit show! You might as well throw up your hands and say DONE!
It gets better or crazier when we learn the true identity of The Fantom and how he messes with Dr. Jekyll and blows up the Nautilus or makes it inoperable for a while. We learn that Fantom or Moriarty or whatever his freakin name is was gathering samples of everyone to make a serum for making extremely powerful soldiers. That sounds like Hitler and World War II, but who is counting where we are in this film. Once again, it was a freakin mess that no one should watch.
The CGI/special effects were god-awful. Everything looked so bad that it hurt my eyes. The coolest thing was the Nautilus, and that might be a stretch. No, I give it to Mina. She was cool as she turned into her bat form, but besides that, everything else was awful. When one dude turned into a Mr. Hyde-like monster, he looked so bad that I laughed at it. Looking like an over-buffed red jellybean. Mr. Hyde was looking strange also. Where in the book did it say he looked like that?
The acting was so bad that it made some people retire. Sean Connery as Allan Quatermain was okay. You should watch the old-school King Solomon films. Connery, the original James Bond, saw how bad this film was and, I think, retired. He said I’m out of acting forever. You made James Bond retire. Naseeruddin Shah as Nemo was interesting. I haven’t read the book, but the dude made Nemo into a sword-wielding martial artist who kicked ass. Once again, all over the place. Peta Wilson as Dr. Mina Harker was beautiful and actually brought grace to this film. It was a little grace, but her role and dialogue at times were cringe. Shane West, as Tom Sawyer, was a fast-shooting gent of the United States. He would’ve given Billy the Kid or any outlaw a run for their money. The one person I have to talk about is Stuart Townsend as Dorian Gray. What the fuck was this performance? Were you half asleep, not interested, or what? It seemed like you half-assed it all the way through and really didn’t give a shit. I found you boring. I even read Dorian Gray, and you didn’t embody his personality.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is one of those films that you can quickly skip over. The concept was good, but the execution was terrible. I know this was before the Marvel Avengers film, and maybe this film gave them the idea. The characters were all over the place and made little sense with the changes, but you needed to do something to make it interesting. I would say put this film on if you need some background sound.
