Movie review
Bloated
and incoherent, this big-budget adaptation of Alan Moore's brilliant graphic
novel jettisons the source material's clever amalgamation of 19th-century pulp
fictions in favor of 21st-century Hollywood action formulas. The product of
this reverse alchemy is numbingly ordinary.
London,
1899: Acting on behalf of Her Majesty's government, the mysterious M (Richard
Roxburgh) assembles a group of peculiar and uniquely talented individuals:
aging African adventurer Allan Quatermain (Sean Connery), shape-shifter Dr.
Henry Jekyll (Jason Flemyng), immortal dandy Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend),
invisible cut-purse Rodney Skinner (Tony Curran), enigmatic submariner Captain
Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah), vampire Mina Harker (Peta Wilson) and American
detective Tom Sawyer (Shane West).
Their
mission: To go to Venice, where a top-secret summit of world leaders is
convening to avert a world war, and protect them from the nefarious Fantom, who
seems determined to fan the flames of international conflict for his own
benefit. The issue isn't that screenwriter James Dale Robinson and director
Stephen Norrington made radical changes to Moore's intensely literary, densely
allusive work of steam-punk meta-fiction in the name of making it palatable to
people who don't even read comic books, let alone 19th-century novels. It's
that they turned an engaging story filled with flawed, complicated characters
into a series of CGI-heavy action set pieces, each duller than the one before,
and flattened the extraordinary personalities into one-note caricatures.
Connery, who also served as executive producer,
delivers the "I'm the coolest, toughest
white-haired sex symbol alive" performance with which he regularly
delights fans to whom he remains the only true James Bond. But his derring-do
seems rather too athletic for a character his age — even a legendary one. Only
Wilson's steely, damaged Mina achieves any sort of depth, though Townsend makes
hay with the silkily wicked Dorian Gray who, ironically, isn't even in Moore's
original story. For a big-budget effects extravaganza, the CGI is surprisingly
fake looking, and much of the production design is less than wondrous. The
League's custom-designed car — a sort of 19th-century Batmobile — is simply
ridiculous looking, and the first appearance of Nemo's submarine, the
scimitar-like Nautilus, is a terrible disappointment. The misshapen Mr. Hyde's
torso and arms are so grotesquely overlarge that he looks as though he'd fall
over in real life, and the disparity between the computer-generated invisible
man and stubble-faced actor Curran in whiteface make-up is so striking it seems
amateurish.
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