It seemed like a great idea on paper. Unfortunately that’s where it should have stayed. Adapting Alan Moore’s high concept comic book for film was always going to be problematic. A gang of superheroes drawn from the ranks of Victorian literature is a much harder sell than, say, Keanu in shades, Lucy Liu in leather or Leo in anything. And then there was the disastrous shoot – reported punch-ups between leading man Connery and director Norrington, floods and fires, this production had everything but the locusts.
Still, that doesn’t adequately explain just how awful League is. Nothing would. Even the title is disingenuous – Nationwide Conference of Cardboard Cut-outs might perhaps be more apt. The source material has been dumbed down to a level that seems within the conceptual grasp of a carrot, and with a cast of characters that includes literary icons such as Quatermain (Connery, in good form), Captain Nemo (Shah), Mina Harker (Wilson), Dorian Gray (Townsend) and Dr. Jekyll (Flemyng), such a strategy seems baffling. The kids were never going to be queuing round the block for Tom Sawyer action figures, so devising a screenplay with the lowest common denominator in mind was surely missing the point?
Well, this apparently never occurred to the makers of League. Their film appears convinced that people who go to the cinema are unlikely to have ever stumbled across a book, and to compensate every character is announced and explained repeatedly in excruciating detail just in case you didn’t catch their name, ability and measurements the first 1,086 times. Indeed, so much time is spent on the movie meet n’ greet that there’s virtually no time left for character development, plot (which vaguely involves a sinister loon called the Fantam who’s out to start WW1) or even action. This proves one of the film’s small mercies.
Stripped of intellect, wit and invention, The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a classic example of the creative meltdown that results from a cookie-cutting, one-size-fits-all, marketing-obsessed approach to cinema. Whatever the truth behind the on-set fracas is, Sir Sean (of the, er, SNP) didn’t hit the director nearly hard enough.