DVDFile

20th Century Fox Home Entertainment / 2003 / 110 Minutes / PG-13
Street Date: November 14, 2006

Bad movies may be sorted into a number of distinctive groups: so bad that it’s good (Bad Taste); guilty pleasures (Cutthroat Island); disappointing (Superman III and IV); I want those two hours of my life back (Gigli); an insult to the intelligence (The Core); and, offensively idiotic (pretty much any teenage slasher movie).  Of course, those choices are based on my own peculiar tastes; you may disagree.  But as I contemplate this review, I don’t quite know where to place The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

We begin with a lovely, literate premise: that extraordinary characters of nineteenth century literature are in fact living, breathing people with extraordinary powers.  The premise belongs to graphic novelists Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill who wrap that concept around a worldwide threat that inspires the organization of the first superhero league.  The game’s afoot, but screenwriter James Robinson and director Stephen Norrington seem to have lost their way.  So intent on dazzling the viewer with imaginative images and exciting action pieces, logic and causality have all but been abandoned.

The film opens with daring crimes perpetrated by uniformed Germans in Victorian England and the English military retaliating in kind within Germany.  The brandished weapons are decades ahead of the state-of-the-art and each country is so incensed that a world war seems unavoidable.  We’ll soon learn that neither government is involved; it’s apparently the work of a sociopath who calls himself the Fantom.  Since Her Majesty’s government is desperate to avoid hostilities for which it is not prepared, a high level conference to negotiate an agreement to avoid conflict is scheduled in Venice.  Alas, there are indications that forces of evil may attack, precipitating war on an unprecedented scale.  It’s felt that a group of special operatives with extraordinary resources and powers is needed to protect the delegates and ensure world peace.

Allan Quatermain (played by Sean Connery and best known from H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines) is summoned to England to meet with Her Majesty’s representative responsible for clandestine operations, M (Richard Roxburgh).  (It’s my understanding that the character was in the graphic novel, so the quintessential Bond’s Quatermain taking his instructions from M is either a delightfully bizarre coincidence or homage to Ian Fleming, a substantially more current novelist.)  In M’s study, Quatermain meets three other members recruited for the mission: Mina Harker (Peta Wilson), a victim of Bram Stoker's Dracula but who’s impervious to sunlight); a quite transparent Rodney Skinner (Tony Curran), a thief who stole Hawley Griffin’s formula from H.G. Wells The Invisible Man; and the reformed pirate of Nautilus fame, Captain Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah), as originally found in Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

The mission goals made clear, they set off to save the world and to pick up two (arguably three) additional recruits along the way: Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend - separated at birth from Johnny Depp), an immortal first encountered in Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray; and, Dr. Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde (both played by Jason Flemyng), here a fusion of The Hulk and Popeye suffering from a spinach overdose (from Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde).  Circumstances will add one additional and more conventional member to the team.  It seems that America is equally concerned about the prospect of war and the Secret Service has sent along special agent Tom Sawyer (Shane West), assumed to be Mark Twain's hero of The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer.

The team travels to Venice just in time to witness strategically placed bombs start a chain reaction that fells Venetian buildings like dominoes.  The Venice sequence is stereotypical of the film’s nonsensical and illogical screenwriting.  The league navigates through Venice’s narrow, shallow, twisting canals aboard Nemo’s Titanic-sized Nautilus.  In the hope that the domino effect may be stopped, our heroes race ahead of the carnage by motorcar (on streets that don’t exist in Venice) to target a building for destruction by a Nautilus guided missile.   Evil henchmen line the roofs to shoot down on the car with automatic weapons (and always miss).  Did the evil Fantom mastermind anticipate the arrival of the swift submarine and the speeding car?  Would the henchmen be placed on roofs of buildings that were about to collapse?  And considering the clever twist that is to come - the real motive behind the formation of the league - is the evil mastermind’s actions consistent with that motive?  Hell no.

The cast is uniformly excellent, but has inconsistent and all too often thankless roles.  They seem to have been thrust into a special effects laden movie for the sole purpose of linking together action set pieces.  I admired the attempts to provide back-stories intended to provoke feelings of empathy from the audience and that offered most of the characters an arc, but too little effort was invested in humanizing the league members.  The psychological baggage was left at the door.  Quatermain carries the burden of guilt over his son’s death - Tom becomes a surrogate - but is too reticent to reveal the depth of his pain.  His character would have benefited from exposing that frailty.  I also admired the allusions to other nineteenth century fiction by authors as diverse as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Gaston Leroux, and Hermann Melville.  And the film looks great.  The costumes and sets are impeccable.  Production values are high and the special effects, a combination of practical effects, miniature work, and CGI are suitably impressive.  The lower costs of shooting in the Czech Republic allowed the filmmakers to stretch their still considerable $78 million budget; much of the money ends up on the screen.

I’m forced to concede that on a comic book level, the film works, but as an action/adventure film, it fails to deliver convincingly.  I suppose it’s a matter of degree, that fine line between the implausibly believable and distractingly absurd.  I can accept Batman’s hand-launched grapple that allows him to scale buildings and to save himself from lethal falls.  I cannot accept the Batmobile’s ability to drive up the shear face of a skyscraper.  The League is a Batmobile that runs out of steam halfway up Gotham Towers.

The Video: How Does The Disc Look?

The film’s theatrical aspect ratio of 2.35:1 is presented in an AVC-compressed high definition transfer.  The palette is dark, much of the film is set at night, yet the shadow detail allows a full appreciation for the visual mood.  Based on flesh tones, chroma seems spot on.  Brightly lit scenes, like those on the outdoor platform surrounding the Nautilus conning tower and the early sequence in Africa, look very natural and film-like.  Small object detail and finely grained textures are terrific; I noticed details that I had not seen on the DVD.  The frequent use of CGI becomes a bit more obvious in high definition.  The Nautilus speeding on the surface is one of the less convincing effects.  But many others are more satisfying in HD, like the invisible man’s face partially covered in makeup to allow his friends to see him.  And in long shots, like looking down at the men working the Fantom’s munitions factory, the clarity is quite startling.  Nicely done.

The Audio: How Does The Disc Sound?

I listened to the core of the DTS HD Master lossless audio track internally decoded by the Sony player and sent to the 5.1 analog outputs.  The fidelity easily exceeded the Dolby Digital 5.1 track experience I had with the DVD.  The surround channels are highly active, plunging the viewer into the onscreen action.  This may not be an official EX mix, but enable EX decoding for a more satisfying immersion in the surround field.  For readers who wrote to ask how I can derive the center surround channel from 5.1 analog, my B&K decoder performs the dematrixing even for analog signals.  Surround effects are both highly localized and diffuse, highlighting motion, events, and creating the ambiance of the environment.  Very deep bass is downright visceral, frequently pummeling the pit of the stomach with rumbling blasts.  (Regular readers will recall that I solved my bass problem with an external amplifier to achieve 5,1 amplitude parity.)  Sound effects have a pleasing dynamic range and swift attack times.  Trevor Jones’ enthusiastic and bombastic score is presented with fine fidelity across a broad soundstage likely enhanced with leaks into the surround channels.  The dialog remains distortion free throughout.

The alternate languages are French and Spanish, both in Dolby Digital 5.1.  Subtitles are available in Spanish and English, for which Closed Captions are also offered.

Supplements: What Goodies Are There?

20th Century Fox Home Entertainment has culled a few supplements from the DVD released and added a few exclusive extras.  On this single-sided 25 GB BD, you will not find the nearly hour’s worth of featurettes found on the DVD edition.  Nor will you find the twelve deleted or extended scenes.  What we do have are the two feature-length, screen-specific commentaries. 

Perhaps it’s telling that neither Connery, nor screenwriter James Robinson, nor director Stephen Norrington chose to participate.  Dissention or disappointment in the ranks?  In the first commentary, you may hear producers Don Murphy and Trevor Albert joined by Shane West, Jason Flemyng, and Tony Curran.  You may not consider these folks to be first string, but I found their comments informative and entertaining.  Many details about the making of the film are shared, including the impact on the shoot of the destructive floods that wracked the Czech Republic the year the film was made.  The actors provide many anecdotes from the shoot and revel in mimicking Sean Connery, both during the commentary and on the set.  The second commentary alternates among costume designer Jacqueline West, visual effects supervisor John E. Sullivan, make-up effects supervisor Steve Johnson, and miniatures creator Matthew Gratzner.  Ms. West delve deeply into her contributions.  In fact, each contributor offers a very interesting view of the process from the point of view of his or her specialty.  I found these commentaries to be far preferable to a boring narration of onscreen action or an ongoing discussion of character motivation that is intuitively obvious to the viewer.

There is a collection of trailers highlighting Blu-ray Disc releases, and several BD-J Java-Enhanced features.  Among them are: a search index that allows the sorting of scenes based on seventy-two categories such as by actor or by character or by location; an interactive first person shooter game with twelve play modes that I found rather lame; and, you may set up bookmarks for your favorite scenes.  Last is a pop-up trivia track that runs over the feature film to inform and entertain.

BD-J seems to have a significant impact on loading times.  Inserting this disc (and other BD-J enhanced titles) into my Sony player caused such a long delay that I initially thought the disc was defective.  A bit of patience yielded the now-familiar swirling circle of dots, which occupied the screen for what seemed like minutes.  (I’m going to have to take a stopwatch into my theater to get a handle on some of those load times.)  As annoying as the delays may be, be patient, the film will start eventually.

Final Thoughts

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen did better overseas than it did domestically, ultimately earning $171.8 million worldwide, so it’s quite possible that we may see another film in the series.  The supplements on the DVD edition suggest that the next chapter may involve H.G. Wells’ Martian invasion as depicted in War of the Worlds.  Let’s hope that a more coherent and logical script is written.  The high definition transfer is excellent, the audio extremely good, and the supplements suffer from space deficiency.  As for this film, if you have a high threshold for maintaining your willing suspension of disbelief or are willing to check your brain at the door, this may prove to be an enjoyable romp.


Here’s a note about the apparent duplicate Buy Guide.  Our I.T. people are hard at work on a large project and have not yet had the time to modify the underlying site database formatting code to accommodate the new 0-to-10 rating scales.  So until they do, for HD on disc, I’ll insert this note and a Buy Guide at the end of the review text and leave the conventional 0-to-5 Buy Guide blank.