Intermission: 'LXG' draws characters from literary history

Jim Wunderle is a Springfield free-lance writer and musician.

Recent movie history offers a spate of films based on comic books: "The X-Men," "Spiderman," "Daredevil" and "Hulk." Stephen Norrington's new film is based on what is referred to as a "graphic novel," a term that translates into "a comic book for grown-ups."

Indeed, if "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," hadn't originally been done as a graphic novel, its main characters could have been pulled from the pages of the Classics Illustrated line of comics, and thus, from great literature itself.

From the pen of H. Rider Haggard there's adventure maven Allan Quartermain. Oscar Wilde contributes Dorian Gray. There's a slight twist to the H.G. Wells "Invisible Man" character. Robert Louis Stevenson pitches in with both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Captain Nemo from Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" shows up, as does Mina Harker, the main female character in Bram Stoker's "Dracula." Even though he doesn't appear in the novel, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer is here, grown far beyond his whitewashin' days and is courtin' someone decidedly scarier than Becky Thatcher.

These characters who in the context of the film are "real" and exist in the same universe come together to battle a fiendish plot (a mainstay of the comic book, er, graphic novel genre). Country is pitted against country in an attempt to start a world war at the dawn of the 20th century.

In the opening scenes, the Bank of England is besieged by a giant armored tank, a machine unheard of in 1899. The men on board appear to be Germans. Next there's an attack on Berlin by what appears to be English troops, again in a giant machine. Tensions are building across Europe, and an international conference is planned in Venice to try and stave off a global war.

What the audience knows is that behind these actions is a mysterious iron-mask-wearing fiend known as The Phantom. If he can get a nice big war going, the participants will all want the most modern weapons they can find. Since he manufactures them, he stands to make a great deal of money. Pardon my cynicism, but this sounds like an early business model for a lot of the goings on in the business of war for the past 50 years.

A man known only as "M" is working for the British Secret Service. His goal is to stop The Phantom. "M" dispatches an emissary to Kenya to recruit the great adventurer Allan Quartermain (Sean Connery) who has turned his back on the British Empire due to political and philosophical differences.

After an attack on his village, Quartermain finally agrees. The others those characters mentioned above are recruited, and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (and one Extraordinary Lady) is in action.

They have three days before the Venice conference, not a lot of time to get things organized and accomplished in an age without cell phones, e-mail or the Internet. They do have one piece of high tech gear, though. Captain Nemo's Nautilus is a wonder to behold, and the special effects folks connected with "LXG" (as the geek faithful refer to the film) have done a good job presenting the sub on the screen.

The basic plot here is standard fare: Madman, altruistic heroes, wise-guy heroes, fake double-crosses, real double-crosses, tight squeezes and narrow escapes. It's the clever gimmick of getting characters from across the literary spectrum together in a single time/space continuum that sets the film apart. And there are other special effects besides the Nautilus. The Invisible Man effect is better than I've seen in a lot of movies, and when Jekyll becomes Hyde we see something akin to a brownish hued Hulk with longer arms but an equally bad disposition.

Connery is always a class act, and he stands above the rest of the cast here. His voice is so commanding and even though Quartermain (as well as Connery) is aging, it's not hard to believe the character can accomplish the things he does. After all, he's been blessed by a witch doctor.

"LXG" starts off fairly promising, but by Act 2 it seems to change focus and go for a dumbed-down approach. An example is in Siberia where the Invisible Man says, "I'm naked in the snow, and I can't feel my extremities. I mean ANY of my extremities." Stevenson meets MTV's "Jackass."

For the most part, I found it to be good dumb fun, but also found myself wanting something more substantial.

One can only hope, at the very the least, the film may inspire some of the uninitiated to put down the comics (not that I don't love comics) and pick up one of the classics that originally featured these characters. The reader will soon learn where comics got a lot of their best ideas.