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BY PETER KEOUGH
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Entering this summer’s league of ridiculous movies is Stephen Norrington’s adaptation of the comic books by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. In the 1899 of an alternative universe, a madman wants to start World War I early by prodding superpowers with atrocities and enticing them with advanced weapons. To combat him, a pre-007 M (Richard Roxburgh) of British Intelligence recruits a motley crew of 19th-century literary heroes, the gentlemen of the title: adventurer Allan Quartermain (Sean Connery), Captain Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah), H.G. Wells’s Invisible Man (Tony Curran), Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend), Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde (Jason Flemyng), and — she’s no gentleman, and with her lascivious bloodsucking and murderous morphing, she’s no lady, either — Mina Harker (Peta Wilson, the best thing in the movie), from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Few of these characters bear much resemblance to the originals — Gray has the regenerative powers of the X-Men’s Wolverine, and Hyde looks like the Hulk auditioning for a part in Oliver! — and neither does any of the settings resemble London, Paris, or Venice (they all look like the same video-game background). Many of the effects do have a surreal beauty (Nemo’s sub the Nautilus, for example), and one could argue that this is a postmodern pastiche, an intertextual simulacrum. But that would require some irony beyond the cornball dialogue and resigned performances. Adding Tom Sawyer (Shane West) to the League pushes it in the right direction of farce, but why not go farther, including, say, Madame Bovary and the Brothers Karamazov? Maybe in the sequel. (110 minutes)
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