The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen

A stiff. I don’t know the comic book series, but it could hardly be as lifeless as this leaden adaptation, in which the weapons have more personality than the characters and the nonstop action often feels like no action at all. The estimable Sean Connery stars as H. Rider Haggard’s adventure hero Allan Quatermain, who joins forces with Verne’s Captain Nemo, Stoker’s Mina Harker, Wells’s Invisible Man, Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll, Wilde’s Dorian Gray, and Twain’s Tom Sawyer (grown up to become a U.S. Secret Service agent) to defeat a nefarious global plot hatched by Sherlock Holmes’s old nemesis Professor Moriarty (who also calls himself Fantom, proving he doesn’t know how to spell). But in fact none of those characters appear; these are just fast-food-franchise toys with familiar names slapped on them (Hyde, for instance, is a clumsy mix of Schwarzenegger and the Hulk). Stephen Norrington directed a witless script by James Dale Robinson. 111 min. (JR)

This entry was posted in Featured Texts. Bookmark the permalink.