Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on July 11, 2003, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a movie with everything money can buy—except a clear story purpose (which is something it usually can’t). Among all this summer’s megabuck would-be blockbusters, it may well be the best-looking and most elaborately thought-out, which makes it a shame that the film isn’t equal to the sum of its parts.
That’s an unfortunate irony to afflict a story in which the strength of a team is threatened by the dubious loyalty of one or more of its members. The titular League is being hyped in the trailers with a line of dialogue describing it as “a team like nothing the world has seen before”—though the ostensible appeal is that its members are all well-known figures from classic occult and adventure literature. Of course, 20th Century Fox has been hedging its bets and not revealing their identities in the promos, presuming that the modern youth audience might not be familiar with the likes of Captain Nemo and Mina Harker, much less League leader Allan Quatermain, played by Sean Connery. At least the filmmakers themselves trust the viewers’ literacy, throwing in offhand additional references to everything from Sherlock Holmes to Moby Dick—though the prop man responsible for the misspelled “Quartermain” in an early scene deserves a spanking.
In any case, the appeal to genre fans here is the use of a number of characters from the pantheon of horror/fantastic fiction, including Mina (Peta Wilson), who, it turns out, didn’t escape succumbing to Dracula’s bite after all; Dr. Jekyll and the most monstrous Mr. Hyde yet seen on screen (Bruiser’s Jason Flemyng); Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend), rendered not only ageless but immortal by his portrait; and a snippy invisible man (Tony Curran). Then there’s the League’s enemy, the scarred and masked Fantom, who is not related to Gaston Leroux’s Opera dweller but may have been inspired by the villainous Fantomas from early-20th-century French detective novels. In any case, he’s not the truly compelling villain a movie like this demands—you know there’s something wrong when a film’s heroic characters generate more frissons than its bad guy.
League is one of those movies that feels like either too much or not enough writing went into the script (by James Dale Robinson). With so many characters to cover (also including Naseeruddin Shah’s Captain Nemo and Shane West’s Tom Sawyer, playing very much like the sop to the teen crowd he is), Robinson and director Stephen Norrington aren’t able to develop a compelling narrative through-line, just a lot of disagreements, suspicions and flirtations in the course of tracking the Fantom and stopping his diabolical plans. Some of those conflicts, it should be said, are fun to watch, as all of the actors are well-matched to, and easily slip inside, their roles. Casting non-Americans (with the exception of West) top to bottom befits the characters’ origins as well.
Yet it’s the visuals that steal the show here, and while they cause the characters to recede into the background, they don’t overwhelm the movie itself; you never get the feeling that the elaborate sets and big-scale FX exist for their own sake. Cinematographer Dan Laustsen (making a leap into the really big time from Brotherhood of the Wolf) and production designer Carol Spier (outdoing even her best work for frequent collaborator David Cronenberg) create a world that is fanciful and spectacular yet grounded in (historical) reality, that looks amazing while making it easy to suspend any disbelief. I could have watched any story take place within these environments (a distinct advantage under the circumstances), and while it’s easy to praise the production values of any movie that’s had enough money thrown at it, this is one where every dime was clearly spent well and wisely.
I also liked the fact that the huge, misshapen Hyde has been created as much, if not more, with prosthetics (typically fine work by Steve Johnson’s Edge FX) as with CGI. Some might find the lumpy monster more amusing than scary, but if you respond to Flemyng’s performance (as I did), you may come to the conclusion that this is the more technically successful of the season’s pair of cinematic outsized humanoids. (There are echoes of Hulk too in Jekyll’s struggle against his beast within.) As Hyde proves to be in the end, League itself is ungainly and troubled by contradictory impulses, yet possessed of certain qualities you can’t help but admire.
