"The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" begins with a squad of British police officers in 1899 being brought into a severe
state of befuddlement when a tank full of Germans shows up and rams into a bank building. This is alarming not because they are Germans -- though I think that's plenty alarming in and of itself -- but because in 1899, tanks don't exist yet. The Bobbies respond mostly by whapping on it with their batons. A few minutes later in the movie, in Germany, a warehouse full of zeppelins gets blown up. All of this is the work of a mysterious figure called the Phantom, who seeks to pit the world at war against itself so that he may profit from the sale of his new futuristic battle technology. The film is curiously mum on how he got the technology; given that the film is about literary heroes co-existing in one universe, I suppose we are left to assume he obtained H.G. Wells' time machine and brought everything back to 1899. Or maybe he's FROM the future. I don't know, or care. Anyway, thus begins the anemic and forgettable -- but not entirely unlikable -- "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen." Like most films, it is based on a comic book, and one whose premise delights me: fictional characters like Allan Quatermain, Captain Nemo, Dorian Gray and the Dr. Jekyll all hang out together and fight crime. If I had read all of the books these characters appeared in, I could probably come up with reasons why they couldn't all exist in the same universe. But I haven't, and neither have you, and I think the people who made the film were counting on that.
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