The League of Extraordinary Gentleman
This is a better version of Van Helsing plus (any) Suicide Squad. The source material must be freaking awesome, if the watered down version is like this. Not to be confused with The League of Gentleman, there are no giraffes here.
This is so similar to Van Helsing he is mentioned by name, plus it has Jekyll/Hide, and Richard Roxburgh as the villain. The meta-references don’t even stop there, Sean Connery passes multiple doors to meet someone calling himself M, that’s just incredibly on the nose.
The plot has the requisite twists and turns, it to keep things interesting. M recruits the league, consisting of 4 gentleman, one proper lady, and a guy with a cockney accent. There’s also an American wildcard. Recruiting the rest of team is their first job, which they do in Paris.
After the party is complete, they get to the first actual mission, stopping an assassination attempt on all world leaders, meeting secretly in Venice. After stopping the city from crumbling by blowing up some palace (fighting fire with a flamethrower), Dorian Gray betrays them and flees to the Bond lair where the big bad holds his assembly line. The villain actually had his picture, so he owns our Gray guy.
The villain is both creating more X-Men, and weapons to fight them, a smart move followed by most arms dealers: why sell only the sharpest sword, if you can also sell the strongest shield that counters it.
The villain’s lair is in Mongolia, so they also need to get there from Venice. This is pre-Suez canal, so it’s an extremely long trip through Cape Horn.
But alas, teamwork prevails and evil is vanquished, while M (for Moriarty!) is shot (True Grit-style) in the nick of time. This requires the sacrifice of Quatermain, which literally passes the metaphorical baton from the British to the American empire at the end of the 19th century.
The squad that fights the good fight, for the empire is as follows:
- Quatermain, probably some Scottish Bruce descendant. Literary the Great White Hunter, as seen later in Jumanji, or Jurassic Park.
- Mina Harker, a proper lady. She was bitten by Dracula himself and is now an immortal vampire requiring fresh blood, but her Victorian sensibilities remain intact. She is extremely embarrassed to be seen with blood dripping from her face, or even show her neck or ankles to other men.
- Captain Nemo, the captain of the Nautilus, sometimes the size of an aircraft carrier, sometimes it fits in Venice canals. The only with with an army of red shirts, most others represent themselves.
- The Invisible Man, some random cockney guv, extremely obnoxious, brash, and loud (just like Hollow Man). Helps himself to any booze, and chases every piece of ass he can see, specialised in irking Mrs. Harker.
- Doctor Jekyll, or Mr Hyde when he hits the sauce, I mean, elixir. The most tortured of the bunch, his power is animality, and he’s not in full control of that all the time. There’s no mention he killed a little girl…
- Tom Sawyer, American d’Artagnan, a young cowboy with requisite six shooters and Winchester rifle. Quatermain replaces his dead son with him, but don’t mention it, Englishman of his sort are too coy to talk about emotions. Speaking of emotions, like any red-blooded American, he wants to shag some English proper lady but she doesn’t give him the time of day.
- Dorian Gray, the one with the painting. Not only he can’t die of old age, he can’t even die when taking dozens of bullets at close range. Obviously a dandy that makes Mrs. Harker lustful.
Rule Brittania. This is a goddamn Seal Team 6, but this time, the books come out before the exploits.
Of course Quatermain is a sexist moron, making Harker catty and on edge the whole time. He never even apologises before dying, but she still goes to his funeral.
Mrs. Harker suffers even more sexist indignities at the hands of a lout Invisible Man. The Dorian Gray private indignities, she solves in the end, and gets the titular painting as a souvenir.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.