For a minute or two earlier this year, the distributor of "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" toyed with changing the title to "The League," inviting snide speculation as to the reasons.

Was the title just too much of a mouthful for ticket buyers, who can at least say "Two for 'T3' " as opposed to "Two for 'Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines,' " or "One for 'Dogpoop' " instead of "One for 'Hollywood Homicide' "? Perhaps a focus group member from Bakersfield stated flatly that he would never watch any action movie with lace-sleeved "gentlemen" manning the cannons?

Or maybe someone saw a preview and noticed there was nothing extraordinary in a comic book movie that rests entirely on its clever premise: What if some of the great fictional protagonists of 19th-Century best-sellers teamed up to prevent world war?

Those are a lot of questions, and they may give you something to think about while sitting through what I will hereafter refer to as "The League," yet another ill-considered, explosions-driven summer movie that fails to deliver.

For those of you who don't obsess over $7 comics, here's the pitch, as imagined by comic book author Alan Moore:

In 1800s London, there exists a very private club whose members, as of 1899, are the adventurer Allan Quatermain, the submariner Captain Nemo, Dr. Henry Jekyll and his alter ego Mr. Hyde (does he pay two sets of dues?), the dandy Dorian Gray, a common thief named Rodney Skinner who stole a formula that has made him an Invisible Man, and Mina Harker, a widow who had the misfortune to make the acquaintance of a dead nobleman known as Dracula.

They have been brought together by Her Majesty the Queen to keep the world safe from evil and ordered to take a young sharpshooting American detective named Tom Sawyer into their confidence.

The comic book, with the sort of irony that is pointedly excised from the movie, had this "gentlemen's club" presided over by Harker. The film, which top-lines Sean Connery as Quatermain, takes a more traditional position, making the hero of the H. Rider Haggard novels the leader in a mission laid out by Her Majesty's mysterious emissary M (Richard Roxburgh) to prevent a world war.

The English press is blaming the Germans for a series of terrorist attacks, but the real mastermind, we understand, is the scarred, masked madman the Fantom, who is hell-bent on world domination for the usual reasons.

Comics writer Moore could afford to assume that some of his readers were actually acquainted with the novels from which these characters have been borrowed. (The H. G. Wells estate apparently did not sign off, which is why the original Invisible Man remains invisible here.)

I cannot imagine, however, that many of the moviegoers who have been disappointed by adaptations of comic book heroes like the Hulk will be too familiar with Gray (Stuart Townsend), the immoral and immortally young creation of Oscar Wilde, or even with Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah), captain of Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea."

Dr. Jekyll (Jason Flemyng) and Harker (Peta Wilson, who gives the film's best performance) may be more familiar from endless retellings of Verne's and Bram Stoker's horror novels. But director Stephen Norrington, who last mucked about in the comics underworld with the bloody "Blade," seems woefully uninterested in enlightening anyone who isn't already tuned to the significance of this Victorian alliance.

Norrington, Moore and script collaborator Kevin O'Neill squeeze in the literary references among markedly ordinary gun battles, bombings and the other noisy accoutrements required of summer spectacles, which makes one wonder why they even bothered to assign these characters literary pedigrees. If Sawyer, played by Shane West of "Once and Again," has ever traversed the Mississippi, he never lets on, even when the Thames goes up in flames.

That "The League" never quite goes up in flames is almost a disappointment. I would almost rather see a marginally ambitious idea like this burn on the ash heap of the Dewey Decimal System than be reduced to yet another action movie in which Connery teaches life lessons to some young buck and the villain has a surprise up his sleeve that is likely to be lost on the audience for whom this adaptation has been dumbed down.

It's hard to blame Hollywood for doubting the sophistication of the summer moviegoer, but we might expect it to be able to discern the difference between the dumb and the dumberer.