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#613 - The Avengers
Jeremiah Chechik, 1998
An English gentleman spy joins forces with a scientist when a wealthy megalomaniac plans to hold the world to ransom.
There is a scene in 2014's Kingsman: The Secret Service where Colin Firth's umbrella-wielding gentleman spy remarks that the most recent crop of spy movies have gotten too serious for his liking and that he'd prefer over-the-top theatricality any day. I wonder what he'd make of The Avengers, the big-screen Hollywood remake of the cult British TV series about a gentleman spy and his female assistant who get into all sorts of adventures. The film retains this much of its premise at least, with Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman playing the spy and assistant respectively. They are made to team up when Thurman is accused of conducting corporate espionage on the top-secret project she's working on. This turns out to be part of an elaborate master plan being conducted by a retired spy (Sean Connery), who plans to use the project to hold the world to ransom. From there, Fiennes and Thurman must confront any number of threats not just from Connery and his henchmen but also from potential moles within their agency.
The Avengers is pretty much exactly the sort of trainwreck that its incredibly dire reputation made it out to be. Fiennes and Thurman have a glaring lack of chemistry with one another that makes every single scene they share an endurance test. Casting Connery as a supervillain is an admirable bit of stunt-casting that also ends up being the sole redeeming quality of this film as you get to see him chew scenery in many ridiculous situations. The most memorable of these is the token "evil council" scene (complete with quitters who are promptly murdered) where everyone preserves their anonymity by...dressing up as rainbow-coloured teddy bears. Yes, really. I had to put in an extra picture because that extremely bizarre visual is also one of the only remarkable things about this movie and I feel that you all need to see it.
Of course, that and other moments of fantastic weirdness are not nearly enough to redeem this complete mess of a film. It's mercifully short but that means it has signs of being chopped up pretty severely in the editing room. The film's more fantastic moments of fiction are not only rendered with horribly dated effects work but fail to amuse even on those grounds. The writing is awful, whether it's turning Thurman into a Strong Female Character to contend with stuffy British sexism (who also embodies a minor cliché in that the reason she is a capable fighter is because her father wanted a son), besides which she channels the same seductive purring that actually worked better when she was playing Poison Ivy. The action lacks any genuine thrills and the attempts to temper a 1960s setting with 1990s edge results in a painful clash of sensibilities. While there is the odd unintentionally amusing moment, The Avengers is still quite the cinematic travesty. Despite its outlandish tale of spy fiction complete with weather-controlling machines and evil clones, it's a frequently dull excuse for a film and you really are better off not watching it.
Jeremiah Chechik, 1998
An English gentleman spy joins forces with a scientist when a wealthy megalomaniac plans to hold the world to ransom.
There is a scene in 2014's Kingsman: The Secret Service where Colin Firth's umbrella-wielding gentleman spy remarks that the most recent crop of spy movies have gotten too serious for his liking and that he'd prefer over-the-top theatricality any day. I wonder what he'd make of The Avengers, the big-screen Hollywood remake of the cult British TV series about a gentleman spy and his female assistant who get into all sorts of adventures. The film retains this much of its premise at least, with Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman playing the spy and assistant respectively. They are made to team up when Thurman is accused of conducting corporate espionage on the top-secret project she's working on. This turns out to be part of an elaborate master plan being conducted by a retired spy (Sean Connery), who plans to use the project to hold the world to ransom. From there, Fiennes and Thurman must confront any number of threats not just from Connery and his henchmen but also from potential moles within their agency.
The Avengers is pretty much exactly the sort of trainwreck that its incredibly dire reputation made it out to be. Fiennes and Thurman have a glaring lack of chemistry with one another that makes every single scene they share an endurance test. Casting Connery as a supervillain is an admirable bit of stunt-casting that also ends up being the sole redeeming quality of this film as you get to see him chew scenery in many ridiculous situations. The most memorable of these is the token "evil council" scene (complete with quitters who are promptly murdered) where everyone preserves their anonymity by...dressing up as rainbow-coloured teddy bears. Yes, really. I had to put in an extra picture because that extremely bizarre visual is also one of the only remarkable things about this movie and I feel that you all need to see it.
Of course, that and other moments of fantastic weirdness are not nearly enough to redeem this complete mess of a film. It's mercifully short but that means it has signs of being chopped up pretty severely in the editing room. The film's more fantastic moments of fiction are not only rendered with horribly dated effects work but fail to amuse even on those grounds. The writing is awful, whether it's turning Thurman into a Strong Female Character to contend with stuffy British sexism (who also embodies a minor cliché in that the reason she is a capable fighter is because her father wanted a son), besides which she channels the same seductive purring that actually worked better when she was playing Poison Ivy. The action lacks any genuine thrills and the attempts to temper a 1960s setting with 1990s edge results in a painful clash of sensibilities. While there is the odd unintentionally amusing moment, The Avengers is still quite the cinematic travesty. Despite its outlandish tale of spy fiction complete with weather-controlling machines and evil clones, it's a frequently dull excuse for a film and you really are better off not watching it.