Nothing About this Was Extraordinary

Sometimes a film can amaze you. That is, of course, a bit of a misdirect on my part because while you can say many things about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the 2003 film adaptation of the Alan Moore comic from 1999, amazing is generally not something that springs to mind. And yet, I was amazed this last time I watched it. This was the second time I’ve seen the film, the first being right after it came out on home video (because I wasn’t watching this dog in theaters), and both times I felt amazement. Specifically, I was amazed at how bad the film was, wondering just how a movie like this got made.

The answer to that is that Fox had the rights to the comic and the studio was looking to make another superhero team up. They already had the successful X-Men in 2000, and Fox had several other superhero projects in various stages of production (like Fantastic Four and Daredevil, and X2: X-Men United). The studio was all in on superheroes and they wanted anything they could craft into another X-Men-style hit. They just so happened to choose a comic by one of the crankiest writers in the industry, and then decided that the only thing they liked about the book was that it featured “heroes” in a “group”. After that, for Fox, details didn’t matter.

They were wrong, though. Details did matter, and the fans of the original comic certainly weren’t interested in a movie that changed everything about the comic (which, yes, it really does). Plus, the trailers looked awful, and just about everyone in the audience could feel the stink of the film coming off of it. The film debuted in July of 2003, right in the middle of the Summer Blockbuster season, and then died a fairly quick death. Technically, if only barely, successful, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen made $179.3 Mil against a production budget of $78 Mil. By Hollywood math that’s barely the break-even point, and may have even taken a slight loss (although home video certainly helped make up that money some). Fox quietly pretended the film didn’t exist, and any sequels to the further adventures of the team were quickly shelved.

So what happened? What caused this film to go so horribly off the rails? Much of it seems to boil down to studio meddling. They took a comic that was very deeply entrenched in its Victorian era, featuring interesting, literary characters that were, at most, pulp stars, and tried to retrofit them into just another superhero team. Adding to that, they then forced in different characters, changed and tweaked a lot of things, and then acted overbearing to the director, Stephen Norrington, which made the whole production a pretty unenjoyable experience for all. And finally, they didn’t give the film as big of a budget as it needed, leading to a movie that also looks crappy on top of it, well, being crappy. There was no way this film could succeed.

But even if we ignore the changes the movie makes from the book (which I know comic fans are loath to do), there was no way this story was going to work. The movie follows Allan Quatermain (Sean Connery), formerly loyal servant of Her Majesty’s Empire, brought back into service to help prevent a war that could span the world. He’s approached by British intelligence, and then, under the guidance of a man called “M” (Richard Roxburgh), is teamed up with other people of particular and special skills: Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah), captain of the Nautilus; Dr. Mina Harker (Peta Wilson), a chemist with a dark secret; Rodney Skinner (Tony Curran), a gentleman thief and an invisible man; Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend), a seemingly immortal man; Dr. Henry Jekyll (Jason Flemyng), the mad scientist with an even madder monster within; and Tom Sawyer (Shane West), an American Secret Service agent.

Their goal is to find and stop the mysterious Fantom, a masked man who makes impressive weapons of war. But their quest isn’t so simple. While working to foil Fantom's attempts to start a war between nations that could span the globe, the members of the team only end up falling prey to his various machinations. Who is this man and how does he always seem one step ahead of them? That is the question, and it’s one the team will have to answer before he manages to bring about the end of civilization as they know it.

There’s nothing wrong, in concept, with bringing a bunch of (public domain) heroes together and having them fight as a team. I’ll even credit the first few minutes of the film, which largely focus on Allan Quatermain (played with suitable charm by Connery) for actually being interesting and engaging. I told my wife, “this is a terrible film,” but the first couple of scenes went by and she had her doubts. “When does this get bad,” she asked, and I even started to wonder if my memories of how terrible this film was actually were wrong.

Thankfully for my sanity, the film quickly goes right off a cliff. The film decides to bring the characters of the League together not because of some shared mutual interest or because they should know each other, but simply because the writer had some action figures to play with and so forced them all together. It ham-handedly throws the characters into the script with both no explanation and then, almost immediately, too much explanation as well. By the third character taking an aside to explain their entire life story to someone else (who didn’t ask and didn’t seem to care before), you realize the people working on this film didn’t really know what to do with the very thing they were making.

The film is also just really stupid. Mina, for instance, can’t just be a chemist, she also has to be a vampire (although not a full vampire, and the film never explains that, either). She has to be more than just smart and a woman, the film seems to argue, because otherwise she’s of no use to the team (hell, Quatermain even says as much). Nemo’s nautilus is one of the biggest ships ever made, but it’s also a submarine, and it’s incredibly fast. When it first rises from beneath the docks of London it already seemed implausible because, while big, the Thames isn’t that deep in comparison to this ship. But then it also cruises quickly across the globe (despite subs not exactly being known for their speed), and it is easily able to glide through a canal in Venice (which, don’t even try to figure that out). And at every turn the film layers on more bonkers things that make no sense simply because, well, it doesn’t know what else to do.

Although I can easily bitch about Tom Sawyer being in the film (when he wasn’t in the original book and was added just to give the film more appeal to American audiences which… that worked so well), I think Moriarty is the bigger issue with the film. While I do know that he was one of two villains in the original comic (the other being Fu Manchu, who was dropped from the movie because of the inherent racism around the character), the film doesn’t know how to handle this character. When he’s revealed to be the villain at the middle of the film it’s not via some organic means, where the heroes catch up to him and his name is revealed. No, first Quatermain says, “M is the Fantom, and in reality he must be Moriarty”, without “Moriarty” ever once being mentioned in the movie before. And then, to prove how smart he is, Moriarty sends them a detailed voice message explaining his whole plan. Yes, like an idiot James BondThe world's most famous secret agent, James Bond has starred not only in dozens of books but also one of the most famous, and certainly the longest running, film franchises of all time. villain.

I get the movie needed to give the characters direction, but literally (and I do mean quite literally) stopping the film so the villain can look directly at the screen and explain everything to us in great detail is not the way to do it. In fact, it’s probably the worst way to do it that anyone could have come up with. Doing it this way is probably worse than simply not mentioning Moriarty at all (since there’s no other Sherlock HolmesOften cited as the world's greatest (fictional) detective, this character was introduced in 1887 (in A Study in Scarlet) and has gone on to appear in hundreds of stories, films, shows, and more. characters in the story, so why bother?) and not explaining the plot. Bad guy wants to do bad things. We get it. There’s not much more we need to know.

This, of course, says nothing about the shoddy production values of the film either. Some sets look good, like the interiors of the Nautilus (which are lovingly crafted). But any exterior shot is done with painfully bad CGI. Any time the heroes have to interact with any large set it’s obvious they’re mashed against green screen compositing that sticks out like a sore thumb. And the few times the movie uses fully CGI characters are some of the worst in the film. They look cartoonishly bad, like rejected cut-scenes from a PlayStation game. It’s very hard to watch.

The one thing I liked in the film was Sean Connery who does his damnedest to try and make his scenes good. The actor signed on after rejecting playing both the Architect in The Matrix Reloaded and Galdalf in The Lord of the Rings, with the latter choice reportedly letting him miss out on a close to half a billion payout from all the residuals he could have made. As such, he signed on to this film with the promise it would be a huge hit and garner a ton of sequels… and then it was one of the worst experiences he ever had and bombed at the Box Office. Connery is great in the film, bringing his James Bond charm and swagger to the role of Quatermain. It’s also the role that caused him to retire from acting, though. He’s great in the film, but the film royally sucks.

Truly, this was probably the worst version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen we could have gotten. It loses all of the charm of the comics, and then fails to replace it with anything good or interesting. It’s a mediocre superhero team-up hobbled further with bad writing and worse special effects. Fox wanted another smash hit on their hands, but instead they delivered the first in what would quickly become a string of superhero failures. Connery, in a way, was right: they should have quit while they were already behind.