![]() ![]() But they’re almost too late: Shortly after the Nautilus plows down the canals looking for explosives, underwater bombs start going off that start the city tumbling down, and only some heroic fast-thinking prevents its total destruction. In this time when secret technology far outstrips that visible in everyday life, the group is able to speed to Venice on Nemo’s enormous and elegant Nautilus submarine, which looks 10 times the size of the beauty featured in “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” nearly 50 years ago. The obviously artificial but vividly rendered look most recalls those of Alex Proyas’ “The Crow” and “Dark City,” except set in recognizable turn-of-the-20th-century Europe. Dark, gilded and resplendent with the trappings of empire at its height, the innumerable settings created by production designer Carol Spier, abetted by arresting natural locations and the work of more than a dozen visual effects houses, create an alluring environment rooted firmly in the past but edging into the future. ![]() For starters, there are large egos involved, not to mention some back story: Quatermain distrusts the “pirate” Nemo Mina Harker and Dorian Gray had an affair some years back Skinner and Jekyll/Hyde are outcasts of dubious standing and all have questionable loyalty to, or enthusiasm for, the Crown.īut more striking still is the world these living legends inhabit. Hyde (Jason Flemyng) and last and, under these circumstances, definitely least, Tom Sawyer (Shane West), the former Mississippi River rat who turns up here as a member of the Secret Service.Įven if these characters mean little or nothing to many viewers, they are introduced with a certain brio by “Blade” director Stephen Norrington, working from a screenplay by James Dale Robinson that warmly embraces but doesn’t overdo the literary refs already in place in the comicbooks by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. They are: the Indiana Jones of his time, legendary hunter-adventurer of “King Solomon’s Mines” Allan Quatermain (Sean Connery, who might as well be playing the old James here) Jules Verne’s brilliant underwater nomad Captain Nemo (Indian cinema vet Naseeruddin Shah) Oscar Wilde’s ageless and indestructible aesthete Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend) the equally invulnerable scientist-turned-vampire Mina Harker (Peta Wilson) invisible man Rodney Skinner (Tony Curran) the brilliant Dr. It thus comes as a shock to late Victorian London when a terrorist known as the Fantom is able to invade the Bank of England with a tank and, after destabilizing the continent, plots to blow up Venice during an emergency conference there among all the Euro heads of state.īut given the lack, back then, of what we now know as superheroes, or even of someone like James Bond, a British gent with the conspicuous name of M (Richard Roxburgh) gathers together several famous and variously gifted figures to stop the Fantom in the four days that are left before the gathering on the lagoon. future for this obviously pricey 20th Century Fox release.Īfter a century marked by mass annihilation or the threat of it, and by tyrants who wreaked havoc on an unprecedented scale, “League” harks back to a time - 1899 - when violent evil perhaps had narrower, more specific targets. ![]() The answer is almost certainly no, which spells a dicey B.O. ![]() Commercially, one must begin by asking whether the international youth audience will be much interested in a picture populated by such 100-plus-year-old names as Allan Quatermain, Dorian Gray, Jekyll and Hyde, Captain Nemo and, of all people, Tom Sawyer. The dawn of the age of superheroes and weapons of mass destruction is imagined in fanciful but literally overblown terms in “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.” Operating from a disarming premise that brings together several of the late 19th century’s most celebrated literary figures to battle an evil mastermind of unprecedented ambition and technological means, this highly elaborate venture offers some appealing elements - exceptionally beautiful design, atypical characters, literacy and an intriguing intellectual basis - that are ultimately engulfed by explosions, effects and an affiliated ponderousness. ![]()
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