THE AVENGERS
WenQing
Written by : Don Macpherson (based on 1960s British Television series)
Directed by : Jeremiah Chechik
Produced by : Warner Bros.
Main Cast : Ralph Fiennes (John Steed), Uma Thurman (Emma Peel), Sean Connery (August De Wynter)
Length : 110 min approx
Rating : **
Official WebSite: www.the-avengers.com This Review Filed: 19 August, 1998.BIG-BUDGET BORE
How may one update a popular 1960s television show for the 1990s big screen, so that it becomes expensive, flashy, glamorous and thoroughly boring? Let me count the ways :1. Take the witty repartee of the original THE AVENGERS between Patrick Macnee's John Steed and Diana Rigg's Emma Peel, and turn it upside down, inside out... add some contrived and overblown complex sentence structure, a touch of artificiality... and the rumours loosed by the Brit press come entirely true! There's no chemistry between Fiennes and Uma, we get strained and boring conversations that reveal nothing about either, and which aren't half as exciting as the dialogue between Arnold Schwarzeneggar and the T-1000 in TERMINATOR 2 (culturally uplifting interjections like : "arrgh", "ugggh", "grarrr"). It's so much blather that I'm nodding off to sleep after a bit, and begging for some action rather than pretentious smarty-pants dialogue.
2. Make everything campy (like making all the bad guys dress up like big teddy bears in all the colours in a box of crayons, or have Emma Peel and John Steed cross a body of water by walking in big plastic bubbles- one has to see it to realise how ridiculous it looks) and still maintain that straight face about everything. The forest grounds are littered with dead bad guys in teddy bear suits, and John Steed gives us the line about another dead guy, Yorick, from "Hamlet" : "Alas, poor Teddy" and Emma returns with : "I knew him well". It's very painful to listen to, and I'm not sure whether to take these guys seriously, or to think the writer and director both intend to run THE AVENGERS legend into the ground.
3. Screw up the plot. This can be done in at least 3 different ways:
(a) Make the plot so villainously simplistic (so that American audiences can digest the original Brit product?) that Sean Connery looks like he's a mad scientist in a kilt trying to control the weather.
![[ pic from film ]](/film/images/avengers.jpg)
(b) Make the plot also so unoriginal that it resembles some freakish 1960s James Bond installment, wherein some one-dimensional bad guy wants to wreak havoc on the world with some startlingly new technology.
(c) Make the plot include some unforeseen twists (like a double-crossing good guy, or a possible Emma Peel impostor in a suit tighter than skin) that one never bothers to explain properly, and quickly extinguishes from the plot in a big hot-air balloon crash because it was just that little bit too incidental. In reality, much of the details of THE AVENGERS come as extraneous and incidental, and there aren't enough things compelling about the film to keep me awake (not even Uma's strangle-fit suits... choke choke)
4. Overspend on special effects that don't look half that realistic, nor are as original as they pretend to be (this can be done in at least 3 different ways also) :
(a) send a twister to the River Thames to wreck London Bridge (twister courtesy of TWISTER, and typical city destruction that we've all come to adore in films like INDEPENDENCE DAY, ARMAGEDDON and DEEP IMPACT). It doesn't help that the bridge, having been ripped to bits by the twister in one scene, is magically intact in the next after the calamity has passed. Clearly the US$75 million splurged on this movie didn't get spent on consistency (or maybe I'm just not familiar with English landmarks... but even Big Ben didn't look very hurt after being blown up the night before).
(b) have some sword-fighting/swashbuckling scenes between Connery and Fiennes amidst a shower of electric lightning bolts and a churning sea underneath a narrow bridge in the baddies' hideout (courtesy of the climactic finale to HIGHLANDER- which also starred Connery, let's not forget that- and also from EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, with Luke and his papa Darth duelling on a narrow gangplank...)
(c) throw in some technological freaks of nature, like the attacking robotic insects that spew machine gun fire and little missiles at Emma Peel's vintage car. This scene is about as exciting as it gets, but even then, I kept getting reminded of HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS when we watched the world from the back of a flying bee. And with all that excitement, the robot bees seemed relatively easy to dispatch, so they never seemed like a threat anyway (not to mention that they just popped into the plot from nowhere, like the many nameless baddies in teddy bear suits. Plus, the main bad guy Connery is only crazed about weather phenomenon, and never even hinted that he manufactured robot bees).
5. Finally, give us a story not worth caring about : ie. John meets Emma, and they're both cold as ice to each other. Sean Connery tries to get lots of money (10 % of the British GNP or else he'll use the weather to snow in 10 Downing Street... only 10%? That can't be very much can it? It felt almost as pathetic as Dr Evil from AUSTIN POWERS asking the world for only $1 million and getting corrected for his underestimations repeatedly).
John and Emma stop Sean in all the most boring ways possible (like visiting his greenhouse to have tea with him, or walking through his garden as it gets hit by every single weather phenomenon known to man, or wasting time being trapped in the bad guy's big mansion). And make all the streets of London conspicuously devoid of people at all times of the day (yes, the extras hardly have a job here! Not even as individuals getting rained on or snowed in by Connery's wild weather), so that it seems no one gets affected by this minor adventure (except the token London double-decker being tossed about in one or two scenes). Even rich maniac Connery has no butlers or maids in his mansion to answer the door while he's trying to rape Uma- ridiculous!
This can't be the best Hollywood has to offer, it's only another uninspired attempt to jump on the bandwagon of reviving 1960s television shows. This isn't worth it, ladies and gentlemen.
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