The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen Review

British comics genius Alan Moore has had many fantastic ideas in his career, but never before had he come up with such a Hollywood friendly conceit as this: imagine if all the great works of Victorian pulp occurred within the same universe. If Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Sherlock Holmes, The Invisible Man, Dracula, Allan Quatermain and even Rupert The Bear are citizens of one vast steampunk British Empire. Salaciously illustrated by Kevin O'Neill (who had previously envisaged an alternative British Empire in the pages of '2000AD's' 'Nemesis The Warlock'), the project was a celebration of the origins of science fiction and fantasy, the joyous imaginative flipside to Moore's 'From Hell', a dark exploration of Jack the Ripper and that era's evils.

Between director Stephen Norrington and screenwriter James Dale Robinson, this most promising of pitches becomes merely RADA-does-The X-Men, an adaptation derailed by incoherent plotting, slipshod special effects and a disengaged performance from Sean Connery as adventurer Allan Quatermain. Whereas Moore envisaged Quatermain as a washed-up and wasted opium addict, mostly present as foil to Mina Harker's strong heroine, the film puts him at the centre of the action. Connery's fight sequences remind you that - as an action hero - he was creaky 20 years earlier in Never Say Never Again. The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen (or LXG as the marketing mavens have it) opens in 1899. Mysterious villain The Fantom is trying to nudge Britain and Germany into war by first raiding the Bank Of England then torching the Luftwaffe's Zeppelins. In response, The Empire assemble their superhero team - recruiting Quatermain from a private club out in Africa, then adding the vampiric Mina Harker (Wilson), an Invisible Man (Curran), and Captain Nemo (Shah). Dr Jekyll and his hulking dopplegänger Mr Hyde (Flemyng) is bagged on a trip to Paris, and - in two additions to Moore's group - Tom Sawyer (West) and Dorian Gray (Townsend) are picked up on the way.

There is some charged flirtation between Gray and Harker (was Wilde's hedonist really so heterosexual?) and Flemyng plays Jekyll suitably tortured and Hyde marvellously uncouth. However, attempts to write in some father-and-son bonding between Sawyer and Quartermain fall flat, while poor Nemo is trapped behind a tribble of a beard, a great inverted bearskin that overwhelms Naseeruddin Shah the way a boxing glove would frustrate a master surgeon. With the alliance assembled, the action switches to Venice where our heroes must foil a plan to blow out the foundations of the floating city. It is also here that the wheels come off the entire enterprise. Quartermain charges Sawyer with the task of driving a car through the famously roadless Venice and into the basement of the next building to explode. A missile fired from Nemo's submarine will track the car and therefore stop the villain's explosives from exploding by... er... blowing them up. Or did we miss something? Possibly, as the soundtrack is very loud, and there are lots of henchmen teleported into the scene to distract us with some shooting, and Connery does deliver his exposition in focused bursts of nonsense that quite catch you unawares.

If you are not wondering why the Invisible Man's five o'clock shadow is peeking through his greasepaint, or how it is that when Hyde screams underwater no bubbles appear, or why there is computer-generated water everywhere but not a single drop is convincing, then you are nagged by clunky plotting clichés that vary from the ridiculous - spinning newspaper headlines! - to the plain cynical - "What fool reveals his stratagem before the game is over?" says the villain, before doing precisely that for the benefit of our heroes.

There are worse films than The League Of Extraordinary Gentleman, but few have traduced such a wealth of source material. Not only does it play fast and loose with Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's work (producer Don Murphy bought a treatment from Moore long before the first issue was on the stands so, feasibly, no one involved bothered to read the comic), it takes a blunderbuss to some of Victorian literature's finest creations.