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While exciting at times, 'Gentlemen' isn't so extraordinary
Shane West and Sean Connery
20th Century Fox
A wonderful idea on paper, with intermittent stimulating ideas, it blows up in its second half, which against all logic surrenders to the blockbuster mentality that pitches nearly every action picture today to the attention-impaired.
Despite the similarity of its title and its predominantly British tone, "League of Extraordinary Gentleman" has no relationship to a 1959 crime thriller called "The League of Gentlemen."
The new film instead is based loosely on a graphic novel -- a highfalutin step up from a comic book -- by Alan Moore, who co-wrote the screenplay with Kevin O'Neill and James Robinson.
It collects world-famous characters from several pop-classical sources -- a character from H. Ryder Haggard's "King Solomon's Mines," another from Bram Stoker's "Dracula" -- divides them into a couple of teams (good and evil), and hints of an impending betrayal and a few surprises.
It's a variation on the premises of earlier work -- such as "Time After Time," wherein H.G. Wells encountered Jack the Ripper, and "The Seven-Per-Cent Solution," in which Sigmund Freud met Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson and Professor Moriarty.
In "League," a great (fictional) braintrust gathers in 1899 to stave off what would eventually unfold from 1914 as The Great War (later, World War I).
But they don't know to call it by those labels. And what happens has virtually no relationship to reality, much less history.
A character named M (Richard Roxburgh) gathers the league, which consists of Allan Quartermain (Sean Connery), Captain Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah), Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend), Dr. Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde (both Jason Flemyng), Dracula vampire Mina Harker (Peta Wilson), Invisible Man Rodney Skinner (Tony Curran) and American secret service agent Tom Sawyer (Shane West).
Hyde, ordinarily shown to be simply Jekyll with bad hair, posture and manners, looks here like a cross between the Hulk and a Macy's Day Parade inflatable.
Among others passing through, but not as part of the league, are Nemo's first mate Ishmael (Terry O'Neill), who says we can call him that, and the face-concealed Phantom, who knows a high C when he hears it.
Sound fun? It almost couldn't miss, especially with Connery as an earthbound, age-conscious central character who has buried two wives and several lovers and whose mortality becomes him.
"Old tigers sensing their end are at their most fierce, and they go down fighting," he says.
Which is what happened in the great "Robin and Marian" (1976), when Connery played a weathered Robin Hood.
But in "League," his Allan and the other characters are elbowed off to the side by special effects.
I'm not partial to the dark, indistinct style of filming and the blur of editing that subverts the human component to effects and editing, but it's a hallmark of director Stephen Norrington ("Death Machine," "Blade").
By no means the worst of its kind, the action in "League" nevertheless is chaotically filmed and assembled. In scene after scene, you lose track of the people and withdraw to check the survival box score later.
There is one great aside, though. It sums up the pointless combat in about a thousand recent movies in which everyone is invulnerable to damage, which makes you wonder why they're wasting our time and theirs fighting.
As one adversary says to another: "We'll be at this all day."
