It would seem impossible to screw up Moore and O'Neill's League, an action-packed lark with literary in-jokes in the margins. But leave it to Hollywood to accomplish the impossible. Stephen Norrington crams his film version with so much noise and wanton destruction that the clever premise gets drowned out.
The film's first shot provides its best joke, as the gleaming 20th Century Fox emblem gets replaced with a logo under construction -- the story takes place in 1899. A masked villain called "The Phantom" uses high-tech weapons like tanks and machine guns to wreak havoc across Europe. Her Majesty enlists a crack team of legends and misfits to thwart the Phantom and to prevent a potential "World War."
Great white hunter Allan Quatermain (Sean Connery) reluctantly signs on to protect his beloved Africa rather than Queen and Country. Other recruits include Captain Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah), Dr. Jekyll (Jason Flemyng), Dracula's Mina Harker (Peta Wilson) and an invisible sneak thief (Tony Curran). The film hustles the Leaguers into the globetrotting plot and skirts the background questions we're dying to know. Why does Mina have vampire powers but no fear of mirrors or sunlight? Was Captain Nemo always from India?
James Dale Robinson's script drafts two additional characters for the film version: a hunky, grown-up Tom Sawyer (Shane West), to appeal to Americans, and an indestructible Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend), to appeal to -- I dunno, decadent dandies, perhaps. West and Townsend fare worst with Robinson's weak faux-witty dialogue, but the rest of the cast comfortably take to the film's melodramatic spirit. Wilson gets to imitate Connery's sibilant burr, the unseen Curran shows some cockney irreverence and Flemyng talks to himself in mirrors as both the tormented Jekyll and the savage Hyde.
As League leaps across continents and world capitals, it strains to imitate the derring-do of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The film also unwisely emulates the Batman movies, wasting resources on an aggressively baroque design that looks overblown and phony. Nemo's submarine resembles a scimitar as tall as the Titanic, and its spacious, spotless interior suggests a kitschy Indian eatery. Hyde is a muscle-bound brute with comically huge forearms, and during transformations, his extremities inflate like a fleshy balloon animal.
Norrington achieves a few striking special effects, such as Mina's transformation into a deadly flock of bats, or the scene where Venice's buildings collapse like a row of dominoes. But virtually every action scene ends with a fiery explosion, and Nemo is given a sleek, convertible automobile so the film can include a car chase. It's as though League desperately wants to distract moviegoers from its literary pedigree.
League's timing could have been better. Hyde seems a pale shadow of the Hulk, a climactic battle has suspicious similarities to the Wolverine-Deathstrike fight in X-2, and the story hinges on a search for weapons of mass destruction. But the movie fails on its own terms. League would have been twice as good if it cost half as much, spending less money on pointless mayhem and more time with some of the most famous characters ever written. The film will fade, but the books will stay extraordinary.
curt.holman@creativeloafing.com
