The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003)

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen arrives in 1899 with a suitcase of Victorian literary characters and a mandate to prevent a world war, and it conducts this business with the grim efficiency of a committee meeting. Sean Connery plays Allan Quatermain as a man who has seen everything and would now like to sit down. The ensemble gathers Captain Nemo, Mina Harker, Dorian Gray, an invisible thief, and a Jekyll who doubles as Hyde. The cast is a mixed international lot, and Naseeruddin Shah's Nemo carries his Indian identity with the easy confidence of a man who has captained a submarine across every ocean. That diversity comes from the source novels, not from any modern casting directive, which is the honest way to arrive at it.

Peta Wilson's Mina Harker is a chemist and a martial artist, and she kills a man with his own cursed painting, which ought to count for something. It counts for less than it should. The film steers her toward a vampiric romantic subplot, and the comic's own illustrator has publicly complained that she was marginalized and reduced to a love interest. Richard Roxburgh's Moriarty schemes to sell weapons to rival empires, gesturing at the war profiteer without ever naming the system that produces him. The critique stays at the level of a villain's business plan, which is to say it stays shallow.

There is little else to report. No queer presence, no environmental sermon, no body-positive messaging, no neurodivergent reading of Jekyll's condition, which the film treats as a monster switch. The whole affair is a loud, disjointed romp that lectures no one and means nothing beyond its own noise. It simply fails, in the ordinary way that expensive films fail, and we are left to file it accordingly.