By EWAN MCDONALD
(Herald rating: * * *)
Jules Verne, Mark Twain and Rider Haggard were, for thousands of a previous generation, best friends in boyhood. Game Boys and PlayStations meant that our sons' and nephews' mates were more likely to identify with Super Mario and crew.
That reckons without the cult of
the graphic novel, in which writers such as Alan Moore plundered classic characters from out-of-copyright literature and rewrote them into new adventures.
The first Moore novel filmed was From Hell, the high-camp unravelling of Jack the Ripper's exploits, starring Johnny Depp.
Here, it is 1899 and the head of British intelligence, drily called "M" (Richard Roxburgh), assembles a team of Boy's Own heroes to be known as the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
There is Haggard's adventurer, Alan Quatermain (Sean Connery, pictured); Verne's Captain Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah) of the pioneering submarine, the Nautilus; Oscar Wilde's corrupt, ageless Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend); H.G. Wells' invisible man, Rodney Skinner (Tony Curran), Bram Stoker's vampire, Mina Harker (Peta Wilson), Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde (Jason Flemyng).
As Ricky Gervais so helpfully pointed out last week, England was running the world at the time, but an American audience demands its market share, so we have Twain's slightly older than fictional Tom Sawyer (Shane West).
Their foe will be the Fantom, a megalomaniac who wants to sabotage a meeting of world leaders in Venice by blowing up the city of canals. Oh, and the snowcapped mountains of Mongolia, for good measure. And a bit of Kenya. Anything or anywhere that gets in his way, in fact, and only the extraordinary gentlemen (and one who is no lady) can stop him.
There's great action, the sort that you went to sleep dreaming about if you read the books under the covers when you were around 12: flying cars, exploding submarines, crumbling cities, the female vampire turning into a flock of bats (hang on, don't remember that bit from way back when).
Connery dips into his back catalogue and mixes up James Bond and Indiana Jones to produce Quatermain, but many of the other characters look a little out of their depth. Mostly, it's a big, brainless action-flick with lots of shock'n'awe scenes and a story that doesn't hang together. Death in Venice? Lagoony tunes, more like.
DVD features: movie (110min); full-frame version; Assembling the League documentary, including Origins, Attire, The Nemomobile, Making Mr Hyde, Resurrecting Venice and Sinking Venice; commentaries with producers Don Murphy, Trevor Albert, stars Shane West, Jason Flemyng and Tony Curran, and with costume designer Jacqueline West, visual effects supervisor John E. Sullivan, makeup effects supervisor Steve Johnson and miniatures' creator Matthew Gratzner; 12 deleted or extended scenes.
(DVD, video rental February 11)
By EWAN MCDONALD
(Herald rating: * * *)
Jules Verne, Mark Twain and Rider Haggard were, for thousands of a previous generation, best friends in boyhood. Game Boys and PlayStations meant that our sons' and nephews' mates were more likely to identify with Super Mario and crew.
That reckons without the cult of
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