Starring: Sean Connery, Stuart Townsend, Peta Wilson, Shane West Script: Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill Running Time: 2:00 Country: USA Year: 2003 Official Site: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

After From Hell, Alan Moore's work again suffers with the film adaptation of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Based on the comic, the film recounts the alliance of extraordinary beings who've decided to thwart the evil plans of the mysterious Phantom. Carried out by Allan Quatermain (Sean Connery halfway between James Bond and Indiana Jones), this group of super heroes includes a beautiful vampire (Peta Wilson from the La Femme Nikita series), the sinister captain Nemo (Naseerudin Shah), the invisible man (Tony Curran), Dr. Jeckyll (Jason Flemyng accompanied by Mr. Hyde) as well as Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend) and secret agent Tom Sawyer (Shane West).

After the opening scene in the heart of savage and sunny Africa, we follow the peregrinations of this league from one continent to another, crossing oceans aboard the Nautilus, from Paris to Venice, passing through Antarctica, to the discovery of a world that strangely resembles….the inside of a studio. On the model of The Crow, Dark City, Moulin Rouge and From Hell, the filmmakers thought it was a good idea to recreate the very visual universe of the comic strip through a plethora of models and CGI. If in each of these cases, the acceptance of a world entirely created in studios was done through an extreme stylization perfectly combined with the atmosphere of the story (Gothic for The Crow, unbridled for Dark City, poetic for Moulin Rouge and glacial for From Hell), here it's far from being the case. Stephen Norrington's (Blade) showy directing atrociously contrasts with the fake aspect of the set. While he doesn't hesitate to serve the same shots on several occasions, what's especially troubling is his propensity to saturate us with "sophisticated" shots which contribute all the more to the falseness of the whole piece: long dollying shots around a poorly CGI-created Nautilus arrogantly claim that you are indeed watching a second-rate film.

From The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a comic strip with thorough aesthetics anchored in History and highly perfumed with violence and gore, Norrington retained only a pretext to plunge his heroes into a succession of loud and unspectacular action scenes. Despite the presence of certain actors like Connery, one follows the adventures of these gentlemen with no interest, quickly becoming tired of them.

  Fred Thom