The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Long awaited but quickly forgotten. That seems to be the rule of thumb when it comes to Hollywood blockbusters, at least on the evidence of this past summer's offerings. If any more proof were required, it comes in the shape of 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen'. Based on Alan Moore's acclaimed graphic novel, 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' eschews all of the wit and gruesome imagination of its source material in favour of slick production values and little else.

Sean Connery plays Alan Quatermain from 'King Solomon's Mines', a famed African big game hunter whose presence is requested in Victorian era London. It's there that other familiar names from the literary world - who double as the thinking man's superheroes - have also assembled, including Tom Sawyer (West), Mina Harker (Wilson), the Invisible Man (Curran) Dorian Grey (Townsend) and Captain Nemo (Shah), while others like Dr Jeykll-Mr Hyde (Flemyng) are soon to join the fray. The man responsible for assembling this team is British intelligence chief M (Roxburgh), who informs them a villain called the Fantom has decided to blow up Vienna, which he reckons will set off a world war. Their mission is to high tail it over to the Austrian capital and stop this nutter.

It takes a special kind of bad movie to make its comic book origins seem positively deep in comparison but 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' achieves this without even breaking into a sweat. On a more serious note, however, what appears on screen bears little resemblance to Alan Moore's nightmarish vision and has sidestepped most of the underhand intelligence and dark morbid fantasies of its source. Like many blockbusters, there's no natural movement in the screenplay, it feels lumbered and thick with lumpy action set pieces which the narrative can't hope to consolidate.