"Here," says the Warner Brother's Studio Executive to Jeremiah S. Chechick in a fictional reenactment, "here's 40 million bucks, plus 3 of the worlds biggest stars and damn good actors, plus the rights to one of the best spy tv series' ever. Now you run along and make sure nothing comes of it."
Well, boy, did Chechik ever follow those directions to the word. What he had should have easily been one damn swell movie, instead it was 89 minutes (that's including the 7 to 10 minutes of end credits!) of gibberish dialogue, weak story, and simply painful viewing.
The opening scenereo has Ralph Feinnes as John Steed, walking a seemingly normal English road and then suddenly and repeatedly being attacked by everything from hoodlums to ninjas to old ladies. In a very blahze fashion, Steed takes them all out with nothing but an umbrella. The action (and acting) in this opening scenereo was so weak that we knew this was deliberately set up, which it was - it was a training course for Steed.
Right after that, we are informed of a world crisis, and that Earth shattering technology has been stolen. The device in question is one which can change weather patterns anywhere in the world with such precision that it can affect one person or an entire country. Of course, when technology of this sort is stolen, it can only be at the hands of a madman, in this case, Sir August DeWynter (played by Sean Connery in all 15 minutes of screen time!). What does the madman want... money and power (duh).
So the world is heald for ransom, and its up to Steed to stop them. But the agency he works for thinks he needs help, in the form of Emma Peel (Uma Thurman), the widow of the man who designed the machine, and a very resourseful woman.
Together Steed and Peel infiltrate the secret hideout of DeWynter (it took them all of two minutes to find it and break in). There they find a slew of dead people in teddy bear suits (don't ask), all of them turning out to be people who worked on the weather machine.
After disposing of a cloned duplicate of Emma Peel (don't ask), Steed and Peel infiltrate DeWynter's other secret hideout (again with no trouble finding nor infiltrating it), quickly disposing of DeWynter's henchman (played by British comedian/transvestite Eddie Izzard), the weather machine, and DeWynter himself. The film's over before it began.
There is so much wrong with the Avengers that it's better to focus on what is right with it...
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Well, there's the visuals (and I'm not talking about just Emma Peel's catsuits here). Chechik did a good job with special effects and the cinematography was pretty good... and that's about it. The dialogue was horrible, futily attepting to quickly establish a raport between the characters with fast-paced (supposedly) witty one liners perpetually running from Connery, Thurman and Feinnes mouths'. It was ineffective as the relationship between the two leads seemed forced, and the joining of Peel and Steed romantically was the (ahem) kiss of death for this tv-to-film translation. There was really no bud of romance between the two throughout, so the kiss at the end, while not surprising, was apalling (because, you see, the entire point to Steed and Peel's relationship is for them to not have one. It's all about sexual tension between the two). And then there's the entire mess of the duplicate Peel, which is explained, but the relevance to the story at hand is never established. It's like the writers (who should be banned from scriptwork forever) just threw that in to add additional length to a short (but still tedious) film.
Characterization was nil in the Avengers. Sir August DeWynter is never explained, it's like the audience is supposed to think "Oh, he's a madman, that explains it" and leave it at that. DeWynter's ineffective henchman is popping up everywhere, but he too is an enigma on screen. The heads of the agency, Mother and Father, also remain undeveloped, although they do try to shed some light on their personalities after Father is found to be in cahoots with DeWynter (the connection remains unexplained). And finally Steed and Peel, both characters never shut their mouth when their on screen, but do you think one iota of dialogue had something to do with finding out about eachother? Okay maybe one, but do you thing there were two iotas?
Simply put, this film is worse than Batman and Robin (as hard as it is to believe), and fight every urge you have to see this movie because it's not worth the time, never mind the money.