THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN: You Spoke Once of Wanting to Meet Your Demon

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) – Directed by Stephen Norrington – Starring Sean Connery, Naseeruddin Shah, Peta Wilson, Tony Curran, Stuart Townsend, Shane West, Jason Flemyng, and Richard Roxburgh.

What’s most disappointing about THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN isn’t that it’s awful, but that Stephen Norrington comes really close to making an honest-to-goodness good film. But LOEG isn’t a good film; at best it’s a diverting afternoon watch for me, and the hope I have is that it’s the afternoon watch for plenty of kids, who then explore these characters in other venues. Because LEAGUE is a little boy’s dream come to life; watching the movie is like watching what a little kid sees in his head when he plays with all of his various toys at once.

As you know if you’ve been kicking around the Anxiety for a bit, I don’t judge films by how well they stay true to the source material; I judge them on their own merits, and if they fall short I’ll sometimes look to the source material to try and figure out what went wrong. LEOG isn’t the comic book, and if you come to this movie wanting the Alan Moore/Kevin O’Neill series to pop to life on the screen, you’re not going to get it. Norrington’s film treats these characters as pulp heroes instead of Moore’s more literary take on them; Moore gives us people who are largely on the downside of their careers, while Norrington seems obsessed with the eternal vitality of characters. Moore is interested in what happens to the characters after they leave the pages of the novels we’ve read, while Norrington’s interest is largely to create an actual all-star team. There’s nothing inherently wrong with Norrington’s approach – it just ends up less successful than I’d like.

It’s 1899 and the world is on the brink of a World War. Some evil dude called the Fantom is attacking both the Brits and the Germans, who blame each other. The Brits have a secret plan, though. They’re going to assemble a new version of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and the key to this plan is recruiting legendary adventurer Allan Quatermain (Sean Connery) to head up the mission. A British government agent heads to Africa, where Quatermain is busy hanging out with some other old fogeys. Quatermain doesn’t want anything to do with the Brits. But then some mysterious cowboys show up and start shooting and blowing things up, so Quatermain decides he’ll help.

Quatermain heads back to England, where he meets M (Richard Roxburgh), Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah), Mina Harker (Peta Wilson), and Rodney Skinner the Invisible Man who they don’t call the Invisible Man because they couldn’t secure the rights (Tony Curran, who played Vincent Van Gogh in one of my favorite all-time DOCTOR WHO episodes: VINCENT AND THE DOCTOR). M gives them the rundown of what’s what and they’re off to recruit Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend). Dorian doesn’t want to sign up, but then some more of the Fantom’s men attack, and so he does. We meet Tom Sawyer (Shane West), a member of the U.S. Secret Service who slipped into the ranks of the Fantom’s men so he could get into Dorian’s house and find out what’s what. After capturing Mr. Hyde (Jason Flemyng), the League jumps into Nemo’s ship, Nautilus … and the film grinds to a halt.

So far we’ve had a few mediocre action scenes, but at least the film is moving somewhere. Part of the problem with LEOG is that the CGI is so false looking; I never feel like I’m in a real world here. Now, that’s not a deal breaker because LEOG is so clearly a fantasy. Because it’s a little kid’s fantasy, realism is never really on the table.

Once we get to the Nautilus, the film starts moving the pieces around the board; every character gets a bit of screen time and the film’s mystery starts coming into focus. Unfortunately, this is the most boring and uninspiring part of the movie. Mina and Dorian have a sexual history and if this were a more adult movie there might be something here. Unfortunately for me, it’s not and so the two characters allude to their shared past without generating any heat. They’re both immortal with qualifications: Mina is a vampire and Dorian can’t ever look at a particular picture of himself or he’ll die.

That picture leads to a pretty hilarious (maybe unintentionally so) exchange between Gray and Quatermain. When they were back at Dorian’s house, they climb some stairs that are lined with pictures. There’s a big empty spot right in plain view, to which Quatermain remarks, “There’s a picture missing,” and Dorian replies, “You don’t miss anything, do you Quatermain?”

Back on the ship, Quatermain and Sawyer are bonding and the scenes almost work. The problem is Shane West’s Tom Sawyer, who’s Southern accent feels like someone doing a Southern accent rather than someone who’s from the south. Again, though, this plays into the idea that this whole movie is really just a kid pushing his toys around in his backyard somewhere, and doing a southern accent himself. Quatermain has lost a son in the near-recent past (which is why he has no love for the British Empire) and starts to treat Sawyer with some fatherly affections. They bond over guns because they’re men, and the film’s best and worst scene comes at the same time. On the deck of the massive submarine, Sawyer comes across Quatermain when he’s shooting his rifle. Quatermain gives him a hard time about being American, which means his shooting strategy is to keep firing until you hit something. Quatermain shows him how to shoot his way, to take your time, to take account of the weather and then wait … wait … wait …

Sawyer decides to take this moment to not only ask about Quatermain’s dead son, but to ask, “Did you teach your son to shoot like this?”

While the camera remains focused on Sawyer, we can see Quatermain exit behind him. It’s a great moment for Quatermain and a decidedly stupid moment for Sawyer; what’s even more of a juxtaposition is that Norrington makes such a correct choice in how he barely shows Quatermain walking away, but such a dumb decision in how Sawyer asks the question. It makes me cringe at how ham-fisted West’s performance is and yet appreciate how professional Connery’s is, with Norrington’s direction caught somewhere in the middle.

The League starts to notice all sorts of things are missing, and so everyone naturally blame the Invisible Man because he’s a thief.

The Nautilus gets to Venice where the Fantom is going to blow the city into the water to start World War I, and the film starts to pick up a real pace again. There’s a bunch of solid if unspectacular action sequences that generally take too long to get through. Take the scene in Venice – the League piles into Nemo’s white sports car as the Fantom’s seemingly endless supply of henchmen fire at them from atop the roofs. How the henchmen knew what rooftops to be in is besides the point, of course – they’re there because the film needs them to be there. The scene is okay but overlong, and at some point you wonder if anyone went, “Jeez, it’s just a car driving down the road getting attacked from above. Maybe we should, I don’t know, give the bad guys a car?”

It’s in Venice where the team is successful in stopping the Fantom and also learns that the Fantom is really M. It’s a nice twist, and it’s probably the film’s best blend of characters from multiple stories from multiple generations. We’ve got M giving Connery, a former Bond, orders, but then M turns out to be Moriarty, the legendary nemesis of Sherlock Holmes. It’s clever and sets the film spiraling through the second half. M’s plan is to take a piece of what makes everyone special and then manufacture a new army of augmented soldiers; his spy turns out to be Dorian instead of Skinner. M is blackmailing Gray because he’s got the magic picture that Gray can never look at, but Gray doesn’t exactly seem conflicted by this turn of events.

The acting in LEAGUE is completely over the top – again like a kid might do playing with his action figures. The only actor who doesn’t fall in line is Connery, who spends the bulk of the film stalking through the film like a very angry, very old man. He snaps at M, at Nemo, at Mina, at Tom- hell, at everyone, and delivers a mean punch whenever he can.

Post-Venice, we get a bunch more decent if not memorable action sequences until we get to the film’s climax. It’s a good old fashioned storming the castle finale, and it ends when Sawyer uses Quatermain’s shooting technique to kill Moriarty as he tries to make his escape. Hooray.

I’d put THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN in the same class as a film like Van Helsing; they’re good and you can get some thrills out of them, but in the end they just don’t quite become what they could be. Everything in LEOG a bit too clean and phony looking, the acting and writing both play it broad, and the action sequences merely fill a role rather than wow me.

INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE: You Lost Today, Kid. But That Doesn’t Mean You Have to Like It.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) – Directed by Steven Spielberg – Starring Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, Alison Doody, Julian Glover, River Phoenix, John Rhys-Davies, and Denholm Elliott.

When I was a kid and THE LAST CRUSADE came out, I wasn’t a huge fan of the movie. I liked it well enough, but I disliked the whole Indy and His Dad angle. I wanted to see Indy running through a jungle and cracking his whip, not working through daddy issues and getting Hitler’s autograph. The whole movie was just a tad too comedic for my snobby teenaged self, and while I don’t remember doing it, it would have been just like that dick of a kid that I was to spend loads of time telling anyone who would listen how much more awesome that year’s Tim Burton-directed Batman flick was in comparison. (I wonder if I still feel the same way, which I guess we’ll find out when I review the Batman films in the near future.) I did, after all, buy a Batman movie poster and t-shirt that same summer, so there was no question where my loyalties lie. (I have no idea what happened to the poster, but the t-shirt still gets worn thanks to not wearing it for like 15 years because … I don’t know, it would be worth money some day? Sometimes, I’m stupid.)

I also wasn’t a big fan of seeing Indy as a kid – I was in the Boy Scouts and the Boy Scouts mostly sucked. We never went horseback riding through the Utah desert – or whatever the Massachusetts equivalent to that would have been. We’d go camping but I never rode a horse. We’d go walking through the woods but I never saw a cave, and I sure heck never came across any treasure hunters who would both try to kill me and provide me the fashion template I would use for the rest of my life. (The closest I came to that was when the older kids tied us to a tree and … I’m gonna stop there.) Boy Scouts was mostly just doing pointless stuff to get badges, meeting at a friend’s house every so often, and going to summer camp every year.

The most exciting thing we ever did was take our tent bed mattresses out for a row around the lake. (They floated. I know. We were shocked, too.) Of course, I never actually got to do it because the camp counselors put a stop to our “adventure” before it was my turn, so screw those guys. (Not literally, of course, because the Boy Scouts hate gay people.)

But this is the movies and in the movies when you go for a horseback ride with your Scout troop, you end up stealing a rare artifact from thieves, get chased through a circus train, almost get killed, and then have the sheriff take your stolen artifact back to the original thieves as the archaeologist thief gives you his fedora and departs a life lesson on you that daddy in the other room was too busy to deliver: “You lost today, kid. But that doesn’t mean you have to like it.”

It’s entirely fitting that the movie opens with a youthful Henry Jones, Jr. adventure because THE LAST CRUSADE is very much a step back in time to attempt to recapture the magic of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. In a lot of ways it’s sad to see a director like Steven Spielberg directing scared, but there’s such a neediness in CRUSADE to apologize for the darker tones of TEMPLE OF DOOM and get back to RAIDERS that Spielberg (and Lucas, perhaps) overdoes it, giving us what amounts to an adventure comedy more than an action adventure.

It bothered me as a kid, but it doesn’t bother me now.

THE LAST CRUSADE is a thoroughly enjoyable movie from start to finish. If Lucas and Spielberg created a darker movie with TEMPLE OF DOOM, in part, because of the darker aspects of their own lives at the time, then with CRUSADE they must have been dealing with issues of lost connections in their personal lives. Whatever else CRUSADE is, it’s a movie about making peace with your loved ones, about accepting and appreciating them for who they are without completely letting go of what caused the severed connection in the first place. It’s overriding message is that you can go forward in your life by incorporating people from your past by finding something to do that you would both enjoy.

It’s not a deep message but it doesn’t need to be because CRUSADE isn’t trying to do anything by make nice with you by having its characters make nice with each other.

I don’t know if Spielberg has ever directed anything coming from such a desperate and needy place, but instead of delivering a third Indiana Jones movie that combined the best elements of the first two movies, CRUSADE goes back to the formula of RAIDERS and makes it all lighter and brighter.

Even the return of the Nazis is incredibly simplistic; there’s nary a Nazi or Nazi associate in CRUSADE to match the villainy of Rene Belloq, Arnold Toht, or even the Ark of the Covenant. Julian Glover plays a breezy, sleazy Walter Donovan, a patron of the museum that Indy treasure hunts for, but he’s just a guy who puts pieces in place, not an archaeologist like Belloq who manipulates locals into working for him. You can see that Donovan is supposed to be reminiscent of Belloq, though, with the elitist air, fancy clothes, and willingness to work with the Nazis in order to get his desired treasure.

Where RAIDERS had the over-the-top Toht, CRUSADE gives us Ernst Vogel, a Nazi colonel who’s always in uniform so you remember that he’s a Nazi and thus evil, because without that uniform to remind you of that he’s just a smirk and an empty threat. There’s nothing memorably villainous about him at all, and he never comes across as a guy who can do anyone any harm.

Then there’s Alison Doody as Elsa Schneider, a conflicted character that Spielberg tries to fashion into a sympathetic Nazi, and almost serves as a micro-example of Spielberg’s use of the Nazis as a whole. Elsa works with Indy (and his dad before him) under direct orders from Hitler, but when she’s invited to stand by the Fuhrer at a big book-burning ceremony, she leaves the stage to get all weepy about the burning, telling Indy she doesn’t want to see his father’s notebook burned. “Is that what you think of me?” she asks. “I believe in the Grail, not the Swastika!” Which I guess means she’s totally willing to overlook the Nuremberg Laws, the segregation of the Jews, and the general wave of antisemitism taking place in 1938 Germany in her quest to find a magic cup.

Indy rightly calls her on it, roughly admonishing her: “You stood up to be counted with the enemy of everything the Grail stands for – who gives a crap what you think?”

Elsa reminds him she could scream, thus ending his mission right here, but she doesn’t because … because she believes in the Grail? Or because Indy was good in the sack? There’s plenty of story to be had with a conflicted Nazi, of course, but that’s far too in-depth for CRUSADE to work through.

Similarly, the use of Nazis in general feels conflicted for Spielberg in CRUSADE; in RAIDERS they were sinister but in CRUSADE they’re basically used for their signature flags and uniforms. They’ve become exactly the kind of generic villains that are next-to-meaningless, and completely removed from who they actually were in reality. It worked in RAIDERS because their imagery was downplayed and their evilness was never in question, but in CRUSADE they’re like uncomfortably used props. I’m not saying that Nazis can’t be used as villains in an adventure film by any stretch, but I think using Hitler to execute a prop joke is a bad idea. This is one of the reasons why I think using an organization like Hydra in the Marvel movies is a much better idea that drudging up the Nazi symbols; unless you’re going to address what the Nazis were actually capable of, better to give yourself some distance so you don’t have to wonder why Indy doesn’t just put a bullet through Hitler’s skull instead of dumbly standing there and getting this f*ck’s autograph. (Maybe because it takes place in 1938 instead of 1939?)

All of this is just the stuff that surrounds and enhances the relationship of the two men named Henry Jones. It’s entirely fitting, of course, that Sean Connery plays the elder dad, since Spielberg took the directing assignment on RAIDERS because he wanted to do a James Bond movie and Lucas convinced him Indiana Jones was better than Bond. There’s been touches of Bond throughout the past two films, though he doesn’t really go in that direction with Connery. Henry Jones, Sr. isn’t an adventurer but an academic, even being surprised when he realizes there are people trying to kill them.

“This hasn’t happened before.”

“Happens to me all the time,” Indy growls back.

Because Connery is Connery, he can make Ford come off as a wounded kid. It’s fantastic acting by Ford – perhaps his best in the entire film series because he has to make Indy seem both his normally heroic self and also like a kid hurt by his dad’s lack of attention. Senior’s insistence that he was a good parent because “I didn’t ask you to eat your vegetables or do your homework” is classic justification of his absent parenting. And when Senior laughs at the Nazi’s insistence that Junior brought Senior’s diary right back to him, Ford’s embarrassed look that lets everyone see that’s exactly what he did is priceless.

It’s the interplay between Ford and Connery that makes CRUSADE a triumphant film as the two men grow together over the course of the story. The Holy Grail isn’t the Ark of the Covenant, but it’s a fitting object of desire for a film that’s about a dad and his son doing something together instead of doing something apart. Where RAIDERS introduced Indiana Jones with a booby-trapped temple that he had to navigate, CRUSADE sends him into the sunset with a series of booby traps protecting the final Knight Templar and the Grail’s resting place. That the Grail is a plain cup instead of an ornate goblet is something that always stuck with me; I dig that the Grail is something that has becomes powerful and desired because it was something ordinary in an extraordinary situation.

INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE might try too hard to make-up for Spielberg’s disappointment with TEMPLE OF DOOM (it’s like it’s saying, “Sorry we didn’t use Marcus last time, so we’ll let him tag along this time! We’ll even throw in Sulla, too!”) but it’s a light romp of enjoyable popcorn. The father-son material that made the teenage version of me scoff now resonates with the older me, and CRUSADE has gone from a movie that meant little to a film that means a whole lot.

THE INDIANA JONES REVIEW COLLECTION:
RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK: Asps. Very Dangerous. You Go First.
TEMPLE OF DOOM: Two Hours of Kate Capshaw Shrieking Like a Harpy
THE LAST CRUSADE: You Lost Today, Kid. But That Doesn’t Mean You Have to Like It.
THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL: How Much of Human Life is Lost in Waiting?

NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN: Blofeld Wears a Bow-Tie. Bow-Ties are Not Cool

Never Say Never Again (1983) – Directed by Irvin Kirschner – A Non-EON James Bond Film – Starring Sean Connery, Kim Basinger, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Barbara Carrera, Max von Sydow, Bernie Casey, and Rowan Atkinson.

Even though it was made outside of EON Productions, NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN has more in common with the Bond films post-Roger Moore than OCTOPUSSY, which was released the same year. Like CASINO ROYALE, NEVER is a serious, personal film, and like GOLDENEYE, Bond is faced with an M that thinks he’s a relic of the past.

I give NEVER credit for fully taking on the idea that James Bond is getting old. They don’t pretend that Connery can still do everything now that he could do two decades earlier and the film is built on this idea that Bond has outlived his youth. He’s called on the carpet for his lifestyle, he’s forced to start taking better care of himself, he’s spent the majority of his time teaching instead of being in the field, and the world is ready to move on without him. The problem is that whatever they thought in 1983, in 2011 we kinda see the point of the bookish M’s complaint. There is value in working out and eating right and if Bond really hasn’t do any of that over the years, then he should darn well start sooner rather than later.

Until he saves it. Again.

But then something surprising happens – this Bond is perfectly fine with the idea of retiring. He’s had his one last go-round and is content to settle down with Domino (Kim Bassigner) for the remainder of his days. It’s really nice to see such a definitive character arc, but unfortunately NEVER is such a dull, dreary, washed-out film that when Bond tells Rowan Atkinson that he’s really going to stay retired, my reaction was, “Thank God.”

Connery is very good in NEVER as an old letch struggling to stay cool and relevant, and there’s something charmingly pathetic about his attempts to bed every woman he comes across. He’s like your creepy uncle hitting on your high school girlfriend.

NEVER goes on forever. It feels impossibly long and is cut together at a snail’s pace. Fight sequences generally take too long; when Bond fights an assassin at the Old Folk’s Home (okay, technically it’s a health clinic), the fight keeps going and going and going and going … and it’s a BAD FIGHT. It’s one of those Bond vs. Jaws fights where the bad guy is so much stronger than Bond that you’ve got to sit through Bond throwing ineffective punches for five minutes.

There’s a nice little triangle between Bond, Domino, and bad guy Largo, but Domino is so dumb and so uninvolved in what’s happening to her that I don’t care about her fate.

Largo is an interesting villain – he’s nerdy but he’s also got some charisma and real malevolence to him. He’s part of SPECTRE, so we also get our 4th different on-screen Blofeld and because it’s played by Max von Sydow I was thinking we’d get another bad-ass, maybe even someone to stand alongside Telly Savalas in ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE. But we don’t. Instead, von Sydow plays him as something closer to a pencil pusher than heavy and as a result, he’s all kinds of useless.

What really damns NEVER is that it’s one of the most poorly paced action or espionage films that I’ve watched. Nothing memorable happens in the entire film. Nothing. Well, sure, Bond plays a video game but nothing else. Let’s get to the video game. Taking the place of a card game, Bond and Largo play a video game that Largo devised that involves, um, shooting and stuff. It’s so stupid that it almost trumps the ridiculously dumb bike chase scene that once again sees Bond in a safety helmet. He’s James Bond! He doesn’t need a helmet!

I give NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN credit for trying to be a serious spy film, but it just doesn’t execute effectively. When Q shows up, he tells Bond, “I hope we’re gonna see some gratuitous sex and violence,” but I was more interested in the film showing it had a pulse.