I’m fed up with the idiots,” Sean Connery once said, upon announcing he was quitting Hollywood. “The ever-widening gap between people who know how to make movies and the people who greenlight the movies.” This was in 2005, two years after the release of what would end up his final film: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a comic-book adaptation so cursed that the history-making floods that derailed its production may have been nature’s way of telling everyone involved that trouble was afoot.
It’s been 20 years since the League assembled, Avengers-style. That was the idea, at least. Based on the comic-book series by writer Alan Moore and artist Kevin O’Neill, it’s a riff on the traditional superhero team-up story. But instead of superheroes, The League is comprised of a collection of Victorian literary characters, all of whom band together to save the world. Like The Avengers, the film was also an attempt at kickstarting a mega-franchise. But due to its troubled journey to the screen and all-round critical shoeing, it never happened.
