With fiends like these

Based on British graphic artist Alan Moore's 1999 comic book, Stephen Norrington's film has a tantalisingly original conceit.

Moore took his cue from the old DC comic series The Justice League of America, in which comic-strip super heroes (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and so on) band together to combat super villains, and created a British alternative culled from Victorian literary heroes.

Thus, Rider Haggard's Allan Quartermain, Jules Verne's Captain Nemo, HG Wells's Invisible Man and Stephenson's Dr Jekyll (accompanied by Mr Hyde, natch) join forces with Dracula's would-be mistress, Mina Harker, in an unholy alliance to see off the threats of world domination from an exotic villain.

In transferring this conflict onto the big screen, certain elements have been lost. Gone is the real Invisible Man (due to technical difficulties with the Wells estate, I gather) to be replaced by an Invisible Man (Tony Curran), who speaks in a laddish Estuarese accent.

Mina Harker (Peta Wilson) has developed into a fully-fledged vampire, which would cause Bram Stoker to turn in his grave, possibly even to rise from it.

The addition of Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend) brings decadent glamour to the party, but the inclusion of Tom Sawyer (Shane West) is merely a sop to the American teen audience who are unlikely to have heard of any of the others.

The most dramatic alteration is to the character of Allan Quartermain. In the hands of Sean Connery, he has undergone a complete transformation from the book's opium-addicted coward, whose best days are but a distant, hallucinatory memory to, er, Sean Connery.

Quartermain is now an heroic old tiger who leads this merry, if unlikely, band against the villainous Fantom ("very operatic" quips Connery in Bond mode), a hideously deformed and armour-plated bad guy - like a cross between Kaiser Soze and Ned Kelly.

Most of the film's delights are contained within the first 45 minutes as the members of The League are sought out and persuaded to join up, in the manner of Yul Brynner's Magnificent Seven.

The Fantom's new technology of armour-plated tanks (of WWI vintage) and machine guns, that seem as archaic as 1980s cell phones do when compared to the current crop of matchbox-sized gadgets, is well deployed, and there is a tremendously decorative gun battle in Dorian Gray's library, which concludes with pages floating slowly down onto the carnage like snow or confetti.