the Avengers (1998)

Cast your mind back to the balmy summer of 1998—a summer that inflicted untold horrors upon cinema audiences in the form of the sugar-coated but strychnine-laced Prince of Egypt, the cheesy, cringe-inducing Armageddon and Sony’s thoroughly putrid remake of Godzilla. All three proceeded to stink up cinemas the world over, making it a summer to remember for all the wrong reasons.

As if matters weren’t bad enough, Warner Bros. then unleashed its own big-budget summer salvo in the form of a glossy remake of the cult 1960s television series The Avengers.

The question simply has to be asked…

Has there been a worse big-budget movie made in the last twenty years?

(Excluding Freddy Got Fingered, of course.)

Expectations had been raised by the casting of Uma Thurman who, fresh from Pulp Fiction, was still one of Hollywood’s hottest properties and one of the very few people to emerge relatively unscathed from the previous summer’s Batman & Robin debacle. This time she was cast as Emma Peel, while the dashing John Steed fell to Ralph Fiennes, another actor seemingly destined for A-list status.

Jeremiah Chechik was handed the directing reins—a considerable responsibility for someone whose previous claim to fame had been the dire remake of Diabolique. Still, producer Jerry Weintraub adored the original television series and backed the project enthusiastically.

The synopsis on the DVD case probably tells you everything you need to know.

“The Avengers, the hip secret-agent series from 60s television, is reinvented for the movies…”

Unfortunately, what eventually appeared on cinema screens wasn’t a stylish reinvention at all but an utterly misguided farce that falls flat on its face with spectacular consistency.

The rot sets in almost immediately.

Within the opening minute Ralph Fiennes marches through the English countryside carrying his trademark umbrella and bowler hat before suddenly finding himself attacked by milkmen, nuns, old ladies and assorted passers-by. Naturally this is all supposed to be hilariously funny because they’re secretly training him.

One almost dies laughing.

Jim Broadbent contributes a crumpled version of M from the Bond films as the head of the Ministry while Sean Connery stomps around as Sir August De Wynter, a mad scientist determined to make the world buy its weather from him using giant weather machines.

“You will now buy your weather from me!” he bellows at a gathering of world leaders—all dressed in teddy bear costumes and nodding like that ghastly Bungle from Rainbow.

Steed and Peel are dispatched by Mother (Jim Broadbent) and Father (Fiona Shaw)—yes, Father is a woman and Mother is a man, because apparently somebody involved genuinely believed that joke was funny enough to sustain an entire film.

The villains they encounter include an evil Emma Peel lookalike, a gang of life-sized teddy bears, one butler, one henchman, several helicopters masquerading as mechanical bees and weather that occasionally turns unpleasant.

And that’s about it.

Everything is wrapped in fashionable Carnaby Street chic and served up by a screenplay that appears to have mistaken Austin Powers for sophisticated comedy.

The problems are almost too numerous to list.

The acting is uniformly dreadful. Uma Thurman’s accent is painful from beginning to end and not even those admittedly magnificent catsuits can rescue her performance. Ralph Fiennes fares little better, though in truth nobody could have survived dialogue as catastrophically unfunny as this.

The screenplay seems utterly convinced that American audiences would collapse with laughter at quaint British behaviour. Every conversation revolves around tea, the weather or some equally tired stereotype. Apparently the sight of British people drinking tea with milk or referring to a girl as a “bird” was considered comedy gold.

It wasn’t.

At least the Austin Powers films possessed genuine wit buried somewhere beneath all the silliness. The Avengers simply mistakes caricature for humour, presenting Britain as though it had been observed through the eyes of an over-excited tourist who’d spent one afternoon in Piccadilly before rushing home to write a screenplay.

Even Sean Connery, who has occasionally looked as though he was counting the days until the pay cheque cleared, has rarely appeared quite so disengaged. He strolls through the film looking thoroughly bored, and who can blame him?

Poor Uma Thurman never really recovered from this catastrophe, and Ralph Fiennes likewise seemed to lose much of the momentum he’d built during the mid-1990s. Certainly Thurman’s performance ranks amongst the most astonishingly awful ever committed to a major studio production.

Perhaps the film’s greatest achievement is that audiences rejected it almost immediately. It vanished from cinemas within days and has largely disappeared from public memory ever since.

Quite right too.

Watching it again recently—in the faint hope that perhaps I’d somehow missed its hidden charms the first time round—proved a thoroughly miserable experience. Never have I checked the “time remaining” display on a DVD player quite so often. Ninety-one minutes has rarely felt so long, although eight of those minutes are thankfully taken up by the end credits.

Still, the film does have one practical use.

It could serve admirably as an instrument of torture or an extremely effective method of getting rid of unwanted house guests.

Jerry Weintraub and everyone else responsible really should have been sentenced to watch the finished product every day for the rest of their natural lives. Perhaps then they might have realised that spending so much time worrying about Uma Thurman’s catsuits, Ralph Fiennes’ bowler hat and recreating swinging-sixties chic was rather missing the point when the end result was one gigantic cinematic turkey.

Ironically, the theatrical version was itself heavily cut in a desperate last-minute attempt to salvage something from the wreckage.

It didn’t work.

Tea, anyone?