The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Wacky
ideas don't get wackier than the one behind The League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen, originally a graphic novel co-written by Alan Moore, who
brought us From Hell. This is a similar Victorian counter-factual
adventure, or make that counter-fictional adventure. It's 1899; an evil
kingpin called Fantom is stirring up trouble, so an A-Team of super
good-guys muster to defeat him. Executive producer Sean Connery plays
Allan Quatermain from Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines; there's
Mina Harker from Bram Stoker's Dracula, Jules Verne's Captain Nemo, RL
Stevenson's Dr Jekyll, Mark Twain's grown-up Tom Sawyer, Oscar Wilde's
Dorian Gray and Rodney Skinner, a new "sequelised" character from HG
Wells' The Invisible Man - the original presumably being the only one
not yet quite out of copyright. Vampiress Mina is allowed to swoop
around biting people, though apparently without turning them into
vampires too; Mr Hyde is a bizarrely bulbous and non-scary Hulk, to
distinguish him from the essentially similar Dorian Gray who is given
the extra superpower of indestructibility.
It's just so silly you have to like it. Sort of. But once the novelty wears off, you are left with a very over-egged pudding low on real thrills. Shekhar Kapur's dull Four Feathers and Simon Wells' ho-hum Time Machine shows that doing Victoriana straight is a stretch for Hollywood. But Alan Moore's funky pre-postmodern fantasies aren't working too well either.
It's just so silly you have to like it. Sort of. But once the novelty wears off, you are left with a very over-egged pudding low on real thrills. Shekhar Kapur's dull Four Feathers and Simon Wells' ho-hum Time Machine shows that doing Victoriana straight is a stretch for Hollywood. But Alan Moore's funky pre-postmodern fantasies aren't working too well either.
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