"The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen"

The screenwriters have also added Dorian Gray, a character, like Sawyer, outside the genre being celebrated. The role is an excuse for Stuart Townsend to ponce it up and act even more like an ambisexual rock star than he did as Lestat in "Queen of the Damned." Moore and O'Neill played with characters outside the adventure and "sensation" genres as well. At one point in their first volume we see a photo of an earlier League that included Natty Bumppo, Fanny Hill and Gulliver. But bits that tickle you in the comics, like Nemo's first mate introducing himself by saying "Call me Ishmael," fall flat here.

What passes for a plot here involves the League racing to Venice to stop a masked villain named the Fantom (the spelling probably a nod to Fantomas, the masked villain of the marvelous French pulp mysteries) from blowing up the city. But in the mode of summer blockbusters, our heroes seem to do as much damage to the city trying to stop the scheme as the bomb itself does. The work done by Norrington ("Blade") in the action scenes is the now sadly standard visual gibberish, loaded with the "what's happening?" confusion that film critic Mike D'Angelo has aptly labeled "spatial incoherence."

The look of the movie is a bit better. O'Neill's illustrations for the comics are fantastically detailed, a sort of fever dream of the 19th century (which makes up for Moore's macabre detachment). Carol Spier's production design and Dan Laustsen's photography capture some of that. The flattened perspectives do more to capture the look of comics than all of the multiframe busyness in which Ang Lee indulges in "The Hulk." Spier and Laustsen get an imposing, gray Victorian splendor, the somber, ominous color scheme suggesting an era on the cusp of the hellishness of the encroaching century.

The movie's most remarkable sight is our first glimpse of the gleaming Nautilus rising from the deep like an enormous silver blade cutting through the waters. (The least impressive is the cheesy Mr. Hyde, who looks like an action figure with a glandular disorder.) But we're given barely any time to look at anything, and Norrington can't invest the visuals with any discernible personality, or convey any pleasure in his concoction, so the look of the movie is both impressive and anonymous.

The cast has individual moments that suggest they might have been just fine with better material. David Hemmings shows up for one scene as an African drinking buddy of Quatermain's and, as he showed in "Last Orders," he hasn't a trace of vanity in him. I prefer this portly old devil with the flyaway eyebrows to the handsome young star of "Blow-Up" and "Camelot." Hemmings transmits a boozy likability from the moment you see him and you wish he stuck around longer. Connery isn't called on to do more than look strapping, which he could probably do napping in a hammock.

Naseeruddin Shah has a stately, imposing presence as Nemo. Tony Curran's Invisible Man has some of the giggling psycho flavor of Moore and O'Neill's character. And Peta Wilson has a nice sense of held-in menace as Mina. She benefits most from the movie's excesses. We get to see what the comics have only hinted at, the logical conclusion of her tangle with Dracula, though we don't get to see it often enough. (Sinking her fangs into some bad guy's throat becomes her, although it's impossible to tell whether the movie is consciously violating vampire lore by having her look into a mirror and go out in the sun or if it's just sloppy scripting.)

After this movie and "From Hell," Moore fans might start to take comfort that the movie version of his "Watchmen" has never come to fruition. His stories seem tailor-made for the movies, but his dark sensibility and the creepy pleasure he gets in playing with historical what-ifs don't fit with the mindlessness most mainstream blockbusters exhibit right now. The irony of "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" is that it has the most literate pedigree of any action movie you're likely to see this year or next -- and it's been made by people who seem to have no sense of how to tell a story.

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