The Avengers Review
by Scott Renshaw (renshaw AT inconnect DOT com)August 24th, 1998
THE AVENGERS
(Warner Bros.)
Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Uma Thurman, Sean Connery, Jim Broadbent. Screenplay: Don Macpherson.
Producer: Jerry Weintraub.
Director: Jeremiah Chechik.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (profanity, violence)
Running Time: 89 minutes.
Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
There's bad buzz, and then there's the the bad buzz which surrounded THE AVENGERS, the kind that sounds like a swarm of Africanized bees after a particularly vigorous hive-shaking. Disastrous test screenings, it was said, had led to a furious round of damage control, including multiple re-shoots of the ending, a release date bumped to the dog days of August, and forty minutes axed from the original running time. A gratuitous "f-word" had even been added to bump the rating from a PG to PG-13. Then, all the worst fears seemed to be confirmed when Warner Bros. announced that no advance screenings would be held for the media. How fulsome a stink bomb could they be hiding?
You may think you're ready for the possibility that a film could be bad, but little can prepare you for something as pointless, smug and misguided as THE AVENGERS. Like the 1960s British television series of the same name, it concerns a dapper secret agent named John Steed (Ralph Fiennes) partnered by his employers at the Ministry with slinky but dangerous Mrs. Emma Peel (Uma Thurman) to protect the world from evil. Evil in this case takes the form of Sir August DeWynter (Sean Connery), a disgruntled former government worker who now can control the world's weather. Thus is is up to Steed and Peel to save the world from meteorological extortion, whenever they have time between rounds of calculated badinage.
It is the latter which proves most instantly and consistently grating in THE AVENGERS. Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman spend most of their scenes together engaging in a smirk throwing contest, each one trying to look the most amused with him or herself, eyebrows so prominently arched you're afraid someone might sprain something. This despite the fact that Don Macpherson's dialogue is a study in witlessness, tossing out embarrassing puns as though they were saucy enough to turn Oscar Wilde green with envy. Though they generally appear content to let their wardrobe do most of the acting for them, Fiennes and Thurman should be commended for one impressive demonstration of dramatic skill: they're able to treat the most mundane comments as though they were nuggets of pure comic gold bestowed upon the world.
That kind of quip-heavy self-awareness was certainly true of the namesake television series as well, so what's so wrong with this variation on the theme? In short, both the personnel and the context. Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg, the most celebrated of the series' pairings, shared a genuine chemistry which made the romantic tension fun to watch. Fiennes and Thurman appear far too enamored of their own charm and cleverness to bother connecting with one another. They're also dropped into a summer blockbuster milieu entirely inappropriate for light-hearted capering. Imagine an episode of the old "Batman" series with a $70 million budget, and you'll understand what's so wrong with THE AVENGERS. It's hard to endear yourself to an audience with low-tech campiness at the same time you're blowing something up every 10 minutes, or sending huge mechanical insects after our heroes like something out of the speeder bike chase from RETURN OF THE JEDI.
We're long past the point of pretending that plot or character has anything to do with 1990s-model Hollywood summer fare, so I won't even bother slapping THE AVENGERS around for exhibiting symptoms of that particular contagious disease. But such a film has to give you something to latch on to: engaging performers, effective pacing, a decent villain to hiss. Not even Sean Connery, blustering about without the faintest idea why his character does anything, can pump up the charisma quotient of this tedious car wreck of a film. The closest recent analog to THE AVENGERS is BATMAN AND ROBIN, but at least BATMAN AND ROBIN had its sheer momenteum and comic-book gaudiness to salvage it. THE AVENGERS is just action sequences in search of a movie, actors in search of a reason to keep smirking. Crimes against film audiences must be avenged; the buzz of surly patrons coming out of the theater may be even more frightening than the buzz on the film.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 buzz stops: 0.
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