DC Saturdays #22 - The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003)

As I mentioned in a couple of reviews before the blog went on hiatus, the time between the Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan Batman incarnations was a bit of a rough one for DC with no official films appearing under the banner between 1997 and 2004. Because of this, I've added a couple of films from the intervening years where the links were somewhat tenuous. We looked at "Road To Perdition" in the last blog before the break and in the first one back, it's time to give "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" a spin.

LXG is a bit of an is-it-isn't-it film when it comes to DC as it was the brainchild of legendary Brit comic author Alan Moore. At the time, DC had picked up a few of Moore's works including LXG although it would only stay with the company for a very short time before Moore took it elsewhere. However, as the film came out around this time I'm gonna say that yes it does just to say count as a DC film and therefore it's going in. Incidentally, the relationship between Moore and DC would prove to be something of a strained one as we'll see in reviews of "V For Vendetta" and "Watchmen" in future episodes of this blog.

The most notable thing about LXG is that it was Sean Connery's final film before he retired from acting a year or two later. However, therein lies the first issue with the film - because the directors blew so much of their budget hiring Connery, they were forced to pad out the rest of the cast with much less well-known actors. You may remember Jason Fleming who plays Dr Jekyll here as being the Jason from "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" who didn't go on to star in a number of no-brainer action films and date Kelly Brook while Stuart Townsend who plays Dorian Gray was previously in the under-rated '90s Brit comedy "Shooting Fish" with Kate Beckinsale. Of the others, Naseeruddin Shah (Captain Nemo) is apparently a very famous actor in his native India, Peta Wilson (Mina Harker) was in the starring role in the '90s series "La Femme Nikita" (which I honestly don't even remember) and Tony Curran (The Invisible Man) has popped up briefly in this blog playing the Scottish vampire Priest in "Blade 2".

LXG starts off in Africa in 1899 where Connery's character Alan Quartermain is chilling out in a bar when he's approached by a British government agent, Sanderson Reed, who informs him that a master criminal called the Fantom has been causing chaos by breaking into the Bank of England to steal structural drawings of Venice (?) and seeking to place the blame on Germany then kidnapping German scientists and trying to place the blame on Britain and the government needs him to help sort the whole problem out. Quartermain initially refuses until the Fantom's henchmen storm the bar and kill his drinking buddy Nigel. After he sees them off, he agrees to Reed's request.

Back in London, Quartermain is introduced to M who is putting together a collection of superheroes known as the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. As well as Quartermain, the group currently includes the Invisible Man aka gentleman thief Rodney Skinner, vampiress Mina Harker (a former associate of Van Helsing) and Captain Nemo who pilots the Nautilus submarine. I should point out that here is where the film deviates from the comic books quite substantially and was the main cause of Moore's angst with it - in the comic books Harker is known as Mina Murray and is the leader of the group. But I guess with Connery the only big name star on board, they had to do a bit of a rewrite.

The group's first errand is to travel to Limehouse Docks and the house of Dorian Gray who M wants to recruit as the team's fifth member. Gray, similar to the book, is immortal due to a portrait of him that ages instead of him which is currently missing and we find out that he's a former lover of Harker's and actually taught Quartermain when the latter was a youngster. However, the team are ambushed in Dorian's library by the Fantom and his goons resulting in an actually-pretty-awesome fight sequence. They're aided and abetted by a young American soldier of fortune Tom Sawyer who Quartermain agrees to take on as the team's sixth member despite Gray's protestations.

Heading across the channel to Paris in the Nautilus, the team capture the monster Edward Hyde in Paris after Quartermain shoots him with a tranquiliser dart. Back on the sub, he transforms back into Henry Jekyll and agrees to join the League as its seventh member in exchange for receiving a pardon for his crimes.

The next half hour or so is dedicated to the team sailing across to Venice to intercept the Fantom who M has told them is planning to set off bombs there and blow the city up. Unfortunately this is where the plot starts to stall a bit as we've got six new characters in a short space of time with no background info on them. Unfortunately it just feels like the scriptwriters didn't really give this a lot of thought and so what could have been a good opportunity to flesh the characters out a bit is mostly wasted on sequences of Quartermain and Sawyer chatting to each other and not really saying anything of interest. We also discover that there is a mole on board as one of the team has nicked one of Jekyll's antidotes and also taken photos of the Nautilus' control room. As Skinner is a difficult man to find at the best of times due to his invisibility and also has a past as a thief, the suspicion falls on him.

We finally get to Venice where the Fantom has set the bombs off just as the League roll into town. Sawyer, Harker and Gray set off on a white knuckle ride through the streets to try and defuse them before the damage sinks the city (including a cool sequence where Harker turns into a cloud of bats to dispose of a group of henchmen) and Quartermain stalking down the Fantom who, it turns out, is M. Okay, erm, interesting twist to have the big villain reveal about halfway through the film... It also turns out that M is Sherlock Holmes' old adversary Moriarty under another alias which is decidedly random.

Back at the sub, it turns out that Gray, not Skinner, is the traitor as he gets back before the others, shoots Nemo's deputy Ishmael and commandeers the sub's escape pod to make his getaway. He leaves behind a phonograph message for the rest of the team when they return explaining that he and M are planning to start a world war between the superpowers and have taken artefacts which will allow them to clone the members of the League with superhuman powers (a vial each of Skinner and Harker's blood plus one of Jekyll's potions).

Gray has also rigged the Nautilus with depth charges and attempts to sink it but Jekyll saves the day by turning into Hyde, sealing off the flooded parts of the vessel and then punching a hole in the side of the sub to drain the water out (yeah, I know, wouldn't that cause it to sink anyway? Probably best to suspend our disbelief here). The team also get a radio message from Skinner who has stowed away with Gray in the escape pod and promises to lead the team to the bad guys' HQ.

This turns out to be in Mongolia and sets the scene for an ambitious but incredibly clumsily executed confrontation which tries to tie up storylines with characters who haven't really been properly developed in the first place and just ends up a bit of a mess. The team end up battling a bunch of M's goons who have the same powers as them (so there's an Invisible Man in Sanderson Reed and an evil Hyde who's eventually defeated by the good one. Harker and Gray have a swordfight which ends with the vampiress pinning Dorian to the wall with her sword and then uncovering his picture thus causing him to turn into a skeleton and crumble into dust.

Sawyer and Quartermain manage to pursue M to his hideout but the latter is fatally stabbed by Moriarty as he shoots an invisible Reed. M makes a run for it but Sawyer uses the crackshot skills he learned from Quartermain earlier in the film to shoot him dead and leaving his world domination plans to sink into an icy lake.

Quartermain is buried next to his dead son in Kenya, where the film started. The remaining five members of the League agree to continue their alliance into the 20th century to help protect the world. After they leave, a witch doctor randomly turns up and performs a ceremony at Quartermain's grave causing a lightning bolt to strike the rifle that Sawyer had left on top of there and presumably bringing him back to life for a sequel which, as it turns out, never happened.

"The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" just feels like a bit of a wasted opportunity really and it's a shame because the idea of a sort of steampunk proto-Avengers definitely had bags of potential and the action scenes are actually pretty good on the whole. Unfortunately, it suffers from a stop-start plot which starts off promisingly but then just starts to drag and drag and some twists which are...well, not quite logical to put it kindly. The worst thing though is the ending - it just feels like the scriptwriters gave themselves way too many leads to tie up with the consequence that it just ends up tripping over its own feet time after time, not helped by the fact that not enough attention has really been paid to developing or making us care about the principal characters.

I really think LXG is ripe for a reboot if someone could put the time aside. With a bit more faithfulness to the comic books (ie having Harker/Murray as the main character rather than Quartermain), more thought going into the script and if they can get a decent cast involved (the ones here try their hardest with the limited pickings they're given but I don't think it's any coincidence that none of them have really done anything of note since) there could be a really good film of this series waiting to be made if it's done right. Unfortunately though, I can't really recommend this version of it unless you're a  die-hard fan of Mr Connery and are desperate to see his final film.

FINAL RATING: 🎩🎩🎩🎩 (4/10)

CURRENT DC FILM TABLE

1. Batman Returns (1992) (9/10)
2. Batman (1989) (8/10)
3. Superman (1978) (8/10)
4. Superman 2 (1980) (8/10)
5. Batman (1966) (8/10)
6. Road To Perdition (2002) (7/10)
7. Batman Forever (1995) (6/10)
8. Superman 3 (1983) (5/10)
9. Swamp Thing (1982) (5/10)
10. The New Wonder Woman (1975) (5/10)
11. Superman and the Mole Men (1951) (5/10)
12. The Flash 2 - Revenge Of The Trickster (1991) (4/10)
13. The Flash 3 - Deadly Nightshade (1991) (4/10)
14. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) (4/10)
15. Wonder Woman Returns (1977) (4/10)
16. The Flash (1990) (4/10)
17. Wonder Woman (1974) (3/10)
18. Batman & Robin (1997) (2/10)
19. The Return of Swamp Thing (1989) (2/10)
20. Superman 4 - The Quest For Peace (1987) (2/10)
21. Justice League of America (1997) (2/10)
22. Supergirl (1984) (2/10)
23. Steel (1997) (2/10)

NEXT WEEK: Time to hold our noses as we break out the kitty litter to review Catwoman...

Marvel Mondays #42 - X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)

Blimey, the blog lives! Yup, I'm aware it's been a while since I updated this thing but I've finally got round to cracking on with the Marvel film reviews so expect a few new bits to pop up on here over the next few weeks.

Anyway, for our comeback special, we're looking at another much-maligned instalment in the X-Men film series, namely "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" The previous X-Men film 2006's "Last Stand" had originally been intended to largely wrap the series up with several characters essentially being written out after being killed off (Xavier, Cyclops, Jean Grey) or losing their powers (Magneto, Mystique, Rogue). However, it seems the lure of getting some cash from another instalment eventually proved too much to resist and Fox were left with the unenviable proposition of having to do a rewrite with most of the main characters gone. Their solution was to announce plans for a couple of origin films, one on Wolverine and one on Magneto. However, the Wolverine film was critically panned (even though it did decent enough numbers) and led to a change of plans with the Magneto film instead becoming "X-Men: First Class" which we'll deal with in a few weeks. First up though, let's take a look at Wolfy's back story...

The film begins in 1845 when a young James Howlett witnesses a violent altercation between his father John and the family groundskeeper Thomas Logan. John is shot by Thomas and James is so incensed that his mutation is activated and he impales Thomas using his bone claws. With his dying breath, Thomas tells James that he is his real father and James is forced to go on the run with his half-brother, Logan's son Victor (the future Sabre-Tooth, played by Liev Schrieber), another mutant who can also heal himself and extend claws from his fingers (albeit from the points rather than the knuckles). The pair become mercenaries, fighting in the American Civil War, both World Wars and Vietnam.

Over time, Victor has become increasingly out of control and in Saigon he attempts to rape a Vietnamese woman and then shoots his commanding officer when he tries to stop him. Sentenced to death by firing squad, the pair survive the bullets and are banged up in a dungeon where they're given a way out by General Stryker (who you may remember as the baddie from X-Men 2 although in this film he's played by Danny Huston rather than Brian Cox) involving his covert mutant strike force, Team X.

The other members of Team X are Agent Zero (an expert sniper), Wraith (who can teleport, played by Will-i-am from the Black Eyed Peas), Wade Wilson (an expert swordsman...and yes, this is Deadpool and yes, it's Ryan Reynolds playing him here), Bradley (who can manipulate electricity) and Dukes (who has a layer of unbreakable skin). We join them a few years later on a mission in Nigeria where Zero, Bradley and Wilson help them infiltrate a diamond smuggling operation to help Stryker get access to a meteorite. However, when the team, led by Victor, start getting violent with an innocent group of villagers in the aftermath, Logan has had enough and walks out.

Six years later, Logan has settled down in the Canadian Rockies working as a logger with his Native American girlfriend Kayla Silverfox while Bradley has also quit the group and is now working the fairgrounds in Ohio. However, after he's finished work one night, Victor unexpectedly turns up and kills him. The next day, Logan gets an unexpected visit from Stryker and Zero at work who tell him that Victor has also offed Wade the previous week and are worried that he's working his way through the team one by one. Still angry at them, Logan tells them to go stick it.

However, Stryker's warning is prescient as the next day Victor ambushes Kayla and kills her. Enraged, Logan tracks him to a bar and fights him but loses. Stung, he decides to take Stryker up on his offer of an enhanced mutation which sees his skeleton injected with adamantium giving him the steel claws we all know him for. However, when Stryker attempts to then wipe his memory in order to turn him into the killing machine "Weapon X", Logan flees by jumping down the waterfall from Stryker's secret base (which he'll revisit post-amnesia in X-Men 2) and into the lake.

Running across the countryside, Logan is taken in by an elderly couple, the Hudsons, but the next day Zero turns up and uses his superhuman sniper skills to assassinate them. The two mutants engage in a battle involving jeeps and helicopters which ends with Logan blowing Zero's chopper up (fnar fnar) and eliminating him. Speaking to Stryker on the radio afterwards, he vows to come after him once he's done with Victor.

Logan takes the Hudsons' motorbike and drives to Vegas where he finds Wraith and Dukes at a gym. Wraith explains to him that Victor and Stryker are still working as a team - as this sequence is happening we see the pair apprehending a young Cyclops at his school and taking him away. As Wraith explains, Stryker is running a facility called the Island where mutants are being taken and having their powers extracted to feed a new super-mutant that Stryker is developing to eliminate any threats from the mutant population (sorry, I know this is probably making your head hurt by now but just bear with me, we're almost at the end I promise). Dukes meanwhile has piled on the pounds over the intervening decade to become "The Blob" and challenges Logan to a boxing match to get the info out of him. After initially taking a battering, Logan bounces back to win by using an adamantium headbutt. Blob explains that only one man has ever escaped from the Island, a mutant by the name of Remy Lagarde aka Gambit.

Travelling to New Orleans, Logan and Wraith track down Gambit in a casino - after Logan mentions that he knows about the Island, the two of them engage in a fight with Gambit turning his cards into bombs and blowing Logan through a wall. As he's recovering, Victor turns up and kills Wraith after a struggle before extracting his DNA, the same as we saw him do with Cyclops earlier. Logan and Victor fight again but this time, Gambit breaks it up by starting another fight with Logan. Eventually, the pair talk and Gambit agrees to take Logan to the Island where we see Stryker starting the process to convert Wade into the new super-mutant Weapon XI. When his superior, General Munson, threatens to shut him down, Stryker kills him.

Logan arrives at the Island where Stryker springs a surprise on him by informing him that Kayla is still alive and is a mutant with the power of persuasion who Stryker sent to spy on Logan after he left Team X. Angry, Logan simply turns around and leaves but it's then revealed that Stryker has double-crossed both Victor and Kayla by promising the former an adamantium skeleton (which it turns out his frame isn't properly suited for) and the latter that he'll release her diamond-skinned sister who's one of his prisoners. Hearing their cries for help, Logan returns to the facility and helps them escape and free the prisoners (including a young Cyclops, Storm and Nightcrawler) with Kayla being wounded by Stryker in the process.

As they're escaping though, Stryker summons the new Weapon XI, the former Wade Wilson now with his mouth sewn shut and named "the Deadpool" due to the fact that he has the powers of all of his brethren including Wolverine's extendable claws (which are swords, his preferred weapon), Cyclops' laser vision and Wraith's ability to teleport. I won't go into what a stupid idea this is...suffice to say it bears no relation to the actual Deadpool character and it was one of the main bugbears that Marvel die-hards had with this film. Logan and Victor fight him on top of a cooling tower, eventually winning by beheading Deadpool whose laser vision as he falls down the chimney causes it to collapse with him on the bottom.

Victor escapes from the Island after bidding Logan farewell while the mutant prisoners, led by Cyclops and Emma Silverfox, meet up with Professor X nearby and escape in his helicopter. Logan discovers a critically wounded Kayla as he leaves and attempts to help her off the island but is shot in the head with an adamantium bullet by Stryker which wipes his memory (thus explaining his amnesia in the first three X-Men films). With her dying breath, Kayla uses her persuasive power to tell Stryker to walk away until his feet start to bleed where he's eventually picked up by a group of soldiers who want to question him in relation to Munson's death. Logan eventually comes round after being revived by Gambit but doesn't remember anything including who Kayla is when he sees her body. The film ends with Logan walking off into the sunset and, eventually, his meeting with Rogue at the start of the first X-Men film while during the end credits we see a hand reaching out from under the wreckage of the cooling tower to retrieve Deadpool's severed head.

If all this plot description seems a bit meandering and all over the place with countless twists and turns that don't really add anything to the story...well, congratulations you've just identified the big problem with "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" - this whole thing is just so stupidly convoluted that it just feels twice as complicated as it needs to be with characters zipping in and out of the story left, right and centre with no real room to develop them and it really brings this film down (just writing this review and trying to summarise the plot gave me a headache tbh). And as for the complete bastardisation of the Deadpool character...well, let's just see I can see why Ryan Reynolds takes the piss out of it so often in the modern Deadpool films where they actually re-wrote the character as it was meant to be.

From here, the X-Men series would move on to "First Class" which was a bit of a return to form and we'll review it on here in a few weeks. Jackman would next appear in 2012, "The Wolverine", another misfire before reuniting with the rest of the X-Men in the ultra-confusing "Days of Future Past". And Ryan Reynolds, after one more comic book tie-in misfire on the DC side, would eventually see his long-mooted Deadpool film project come to fruition in 2015 and would set things straight on which the correct version of Deadpool was in his own inimitable style (1:20 in the video below). Which probably sums up this misfire of a movie better than anything ever could...

FINAL RATING: 🐺🐺🐺🐺 (4/10)

CURRENT MARVEL FILM TABLE

1. Iron Man (2008) (10/10)
2. Spiderman 2 (2004) (9/10)
3. Spiderman (2002) (9/10)
4. X-Men 2 (2002) (8/10)
5. Men In Black (1997) (8/10)
6. X-Men (2000) (8/10)
7. The Incredible Hulk (2008) (7/10)
8. Blade 2 (2001) (7/10)
9. Blade (1998) (7/10)
10. The Incredible Hulk Returns (1988) (6/10)
11. Spiderman 3 (2007) (6/10)
12. Fantastic Four - Rise Of The Silver Surfer (6/10)
13. The Trial Of The Incredible Hulk (1989) (6/10)
14. The Punisher (2004) (6/10)
15. Conan The Barbarian (1982) (6/10)
16. Elektra (2005) (6/10)
17. Conan The Destroyer (1984) (6/10)
18. X-Men: Last Stand (2006) (6/10)
19. Blade Trinity (2004) (6/10)
20. Men In Black 2 (2000) (6/10)
21. The Incredible Hulk (1977) (5/10)
22. The Fantastic Four (2005) (5/10)
23. Doctor Mordrid (1992) (5/10)
24. The Punisher (1989) (5/10)
25. Doctor Strange (1978) (5/10)
26. Nick Fury: Agent Of SHIELD (1998) (4/10)
27. The Fantastic Four (1994) (4/10)
28. Punisher: War Zone (2008) (4/10)
29. X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) (4/10)
30. Hulk (2003) (4/10)
31. Red Sonja (1985) (4/10)
32. Captain America 2: Death Too Soon (1979) (4/10)
33. Spiderman (1977) (4/10)
34. Ghost Rider (2007) (3/10)
35. Bride of the Incredible Hulk (1978) (3/10)
36. The Death Of The Incredible Hulk (1990) (3/10)
37. Man-Thing (2005) (3/10)
38. Return of the Incredible Hulk (1978) (3/10)
39. Spiderman: The Dragon's Challenge (1979) (3/10)
40. Howard The Duck (1986) (2/10)
41. Captain America (1990) (2/10)
42. Captain America (1979) (2/10)
43. Generation X (1996) (2/10)
44. Spiderman Strikes Back (1978) (2/10)
45. Daredevil (2003) (2/10)

NEXT WEEK: We return to the MCU (thank the lord) with Iron Man 2...