The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen arrived on 11 July 2003 with a tagline promising that “the power of seven become a league of one.” What the film delivers is seven famous characters, one exhausted movie star, and a plot that shares almost nothing with the Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill comic it claims to adapt. It scored 16% on Rotten Tomatoes, a 1.6/10 verdict that this review matches.
Trailer, via FoxConnect.
Allan Quatermain and the $17 Million Paycheck
The film opens in 1899 with a terrorist called the Fantom robbing the Bank of England for Leonardo da Vinci’s blueprints of Venice’s foundations. German scientists are kidnapped. A Zeppelin factory in Berlin is destroyed. Britain and Germany edge toward war, and the British government responds by assembling Victorian literature’s greatest hits.
Sean Connery plays Allan Quatermain, the retired hunter recruited in Kenya Colony by emissary Sanderson Reed. Connery took the part for $17 million after turning down Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings and the Architect in The Matrix. That paycheck left the filmmakers with little room to hire other stars, and it shows.
Naseeruddin Shah is Captain Nemo. Peta Wilson is Mina Harker, a vampire chemist. Tony Curran is Rodney Skinner, an invisible thief. Stuart Townsend is Dorian Gray. Shane West is Tom Sawyer, an American Secret Service agent. Jason Flemyng is Dr. Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde. Richard Roxburgh is M, who turns out to be the Fantom, who turns out to be Professor James Moriarty.
A Plot That Moves Like a Checklist
The League forms, recruits, and travels to Venice aboard the Nautilus to stop an attack on the world’s leaders. A mole is suspected after camera flash powder turns up in the wheelhouse and a vial of Jekyll’s transformation formula goes missing. Suspicion falls on Skinner. The film resolves this the way it resolves everything: loudly.
Here is the running order of what the League must do before the credits:
| Order | Task | Location |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Recruit Quatermain | Kenya Colony |
| 2 | Meet M, learn of the Venice attack | London |
| 3 | Recruit Dorian Gray | London Docklands |
| 4 | Capture Edward Hyde | Paris |
| 5 | Reach Venice aboard the Nautilus | At sea |
| 6 | Stop the Fantom’s conference attack | Venice |
The film runs 110 minutes. It feels longer, because every stop on that table is a set piece that exists to introduce a character rather than to advance a story.
What the Cast Cannot Fix
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen draws on Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard, Ian Fleming, Herman Melville, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe, Gaston Leroux and Mark Twain. That is a remarkable list of sources. The film uses them as name tags.
It was Connery’s final role in a theatrically released live-action film before his retirement in June 2006 and his death in October 2020. That fact carries more weight now than the movie ever did.
The film grossed over $179 million worldwide against a $78 million budget, with $48.6 million in rental revenue and $36.4 million in DVD sales as of 2003. It made money. It also earned its 16%.
Skinner, Sawyer and a Cut Character
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a $78 million budget spent on a premise that needed a script. The casting is the whole movie, and the casting is the problem — Connery’s fee consumed the money that should have bought a better screenplay.
- The comic’s plot is abandoned almost entirely.
- The ensemble never becomes a team on screen.
- The Fantom reveal lands without weight because Roxburgh’s M was never given any.
- The Venice climax resolves a threat the film never made us feel.
A character named Eva Draper, played by Winter Ave Zoli, stayed in the promotional materials despite being cut from the final film. That is the whole production in miniature: a promise on the poster that the movie does not keep.
This is a 1.6 of 10.
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