Film

The Avengers (1998)

Director: Jeremiah Chechik

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Lousy as it is, Warner Bros' big budget version of the cult '60s TV series isn't any worse than, say, the last two Batman flicks. Charm is a difficult quality to duplicate, and while Fiennes makes a passable stab at debonair, Uma Thurman's notion of insouciance translates as smug and spacey; she's far more convincing as Mrs Peel's deadly mute double, a robot, presumably (like so much of the plot, that remains a matter of conjecture). In some ways, the movie's inadequacies are inextricable from its virtues: heavy cuts have made a mockery of any sense of continuity, but then The Avengers always peddled surreal and absurdist conceits, so artificiality is the name of the game (there are a few neat ideas here: a conference in teddy bear suits, a stairway out of Escher, and an invisible cameo by Patrick Macnee). Its ersatz Englishness makes a certain sense. The trouble is, the film's decadence isn't a put-on, it is, simply, depressingly, degeneratively, decadent.

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