# Avengers, The (1998)

### reviewed by
Michael Redman

    Someone's messing with my childhood

    The Avengers
    A Film Review By Michael Redman
    Copyright 1998 By Michael Redman

    * (out of ****)

Conventional wisdom among collectibles retailers is that children's items begin to dramatically escalate in price about twenty-five or thirty years after the item was made. That's when the kids of that time have jobs, disposable income and a desire to re-visit the awe and wonderment of childhood that has disappeared from their lives. Check out the prices of toys from the late sixties and you'll find that Yogi Bear lunch boxes are demanding big bucks.

There's a heavy nostalgia nowadays for the late sixties and early seventies and nowhere is it more apparent than on the big screen. Boomers are now mostly in their forties and fifties and have lived in the work-a-day world for a long time. They'd like to re-capture some of that fun they remember from days of yore. Hollywood seems more than eager to churn out product to help them. Directors are zealous to put their stamp on icons from that time.

And for the most part they're messing it up.

"Mission Impossible", "Lost In Space", "Godzilla", "Zorro". None of these successfully capture the originals. None of these are even good films. You can now add "The Avengers" to the list.

The British television series began in 1961. Super secret agent John Steed (then-Patrick Macnee) and his third partner, Emma Peel (then-Diana Rigg) are the pair that the American audience fell for. Surrealistic and witty, the series fit the mood of the times. The leather-clad Rigg probably didn't hurt the ratings either. After all it's not a coincidence that you can't pronounce her character's name without "appeal".

Now we're in the nineties. Steed (now-Ralph Fiennes) and Peel (now-Uma Thurman) are battling evil genius Sir August De Wynter (Sean Connery) who is screwing with England's weather.

That's about as much of a plot as we have. There's some footage about a lot of other things that either don't make sense or make even less sense. We get betrayal for some unknown reason. Evil clones appear and vanish and have no connection to the film. Remarkably ineffective giant flying robot wasps with machine guns in their belly come from nowhere for no good reason. There's a high tech hot air balloon, but I have no idea why anyone's in it.

The spy agency is run by a man called "Mother" who is in a wheelchair and a woman named "Father" who is blind...at least in some scenes. There's probably a reason for all of this, but we'll never know it.

Macnee makes an appearance of sorts. He is the voice for an invisible man whose character goes nowhere in a scene that does nothing.

A group of villains sits around a table, all clad in huge pastel-colored teddy bear outfits. At first it's humorous to watch the teddies waddle around, but then it becomes goofy.

The movie is a medley of clutter, confusion and wrong decisions around every corner.

It feels like major portions of the film are missing. The storyline jumps rather than flows. Reportedly the film was re-cut several times. This is one of those times where the whole is less than the sum of the parts especially since some of the parts appear to be missing.

There's one good point where Peel is running from one room to another in a house designed by Escher. Other than that, the effects are second-rate. The weather threat is old hat as are the scenes of huge tornadoes.

Thurman almost makes an adequate Emma Peel but it doesn't work. She looks good, dresses in all the right fetish outfits but there's no spark. Fiennes fares even less well. Macnee's Steed was a witty man of the world with a sense of humor. Fiennes' agent comes across as a dour kid in grown-up clothes who has never been out of his home town. Even Connery, one of the greatest living actors, doesn't have much of a presence outside of a few fiery scenes.

The action scenes are difficult to follow. Director Jeremiah Chechik (responsible for the atrocious remake of "Diabolique") somehow manages to put the camera exactly where it shouldn't be. Things happen, people move around, but even if, with the utmost effort, you were able to care about any of it, the scenes are bewildering.

The primary allure of the original was the interaction between the two leads. Witty banter and an underplayed sexual tension were a winning combination. Admittedly there are a few humorous sexual puns in the film, but there's no chemistry and the repartee is anything but clever. One of Emma Peel's first lines of dialog is "Rules are made to be broken." It doesn't get any better.

Advance word alone should have been enough to scare off anyone. The release date was changed several times. Connery refuses to promote the film. There was no screening for critics which may have been a good choice for Warner Brothers. At least this way, they get something of an audience for the first weekend before the news gets out.

Admittedly I haven't seen an episode of the television series for a couple of decades. My guess is that it would be severely dated now. No matter how antiquated it might be, there's no doubt that it holds up better than this film is at first viewing.

There's no reason to waste any part of the last few days of summer inside watching this movie. No reason at all.

(Michael Redman has written this column for one score and three years and thinks he's going outside for a while. He'll come in occasionally to check his email at redman@bvoice.com)

[This appeared in the 8/20/98 "Bloomington Independent" (formerly the "Bloomington Voice"), Bloomington, Indiana. Michael Redman can be contacted at redman@bvoice.com ]

-- mailto:redman@bvoice.com This week's film review at http://www.bvoice.com/ Film reviews archive at http://us.imdb.com/M/reviews_by?Michael%20Redman

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