A League of their Own!

It's been quite a busy week, so I've had little time to work up new material although I have several items I want to talk about. Hopefully we'll be back to business as usual next week.

In the meantime, here's another one from the archives, a review of the movie version of "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" originally written for Sci-Fi-London.

"The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" is the latest in the recent spate of property plundering by Hollywood of its lesser regarded medium, the comic book, and therefore comes with a weight of expectation, not only as an adaptation, but also in comparison to the most successful comic book based films of the last few years.

From the root material created by British dream team Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen / The League / LXG" (Pick title as preferred) features a series of figures from literature of the Victorian-era brought together by the mysterious 'M' on behalf of the British government, to foil the efforts of the equally mysterious 'Fantom' to bring about the unthinkable. A World War! It is somewhat surprising that although the idea of vastly different characters being united in prose has been a staple of authors like Phillip Jose Farmer and Kim Newman for a long time, we haven't seen this concept (surely the highest of the high) translated to the screen until now.

As a movie in its own right, "The League" has much to recommend it. Sean Connery in the role of league-patriarch and Indiana Jones-literary antecedent Alan Quartermain is at his butt-kicking best, even so many years after receiving his bus pass. Indeed, the entire league acquit themselves admirably amongst the whiz-bang action and special effects wizardry that is expected from a blockbuster in this mould, despite material, such as a scene of two virtually indestructible characters playing slice and dice to the death, seeming derivative in its resemblance to a similar scene in the far superior X2.

Sadly, the film is severely flawed in structure and execution. With the insertion of Tom Sawyer (Shane West) and Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend) into the already large cast of characters from the comic-book (Mina Harker, Captain Nemo, The Invisible Man and Dr. Jekyll / Mr. Hyde) it becomes hard to keep track of all the characters and in a desperate attempt to justify their involvement in the plot the film becomes too 'busy', eventually degenerating into a situation where we have to follow four different branches of the plot at once. Additionally, the film suffers from the clumsy attempts to fill the less literary aware members of the audience into the backgrounds of these characters. Wordy and dull expository scenes, seemingly dropped at random into the action, leave the audience metaphorically tripped up and sprawling on their faces.

Impressive to look at, but as an action film it sacrifices much of the literary charm of the source material. Ultimately, a brave attempt at translating one type of comic book into another kind of film and therefore disappointing to both fans of the book and the regular moviegoer.