The Avengers is a 1998 American spy film directed by Jeremiah Chechik, an adaptation of the 1961–1969 British television series of the same name. It stars Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman as secret agents John Steed and Emma Peel, and Sean Connery as Sir August de Wynter, a mad scientist bent on controlling the world's weather. Patrick Macnee, Steed in the original series, makes a vocal cameo as the voice of Invisible Jones.
The Avengers was released by Warner Bros. on August 14, 1998. The film underperformed at the box-office, only grossing $54.7 million against its $60 million budget and was met with overwhelmingly negative reviews from critics.
Plot
Secret agent John Steed and meteorologist Dr. Emma Peel are summoned to The Ministry. They meet the spymaster, codenamed Mother, who informs them that the Prospero project — an attempt to influence the weather — was apparently sabotaged by Peel. Dr. Peel claims she is innocent, and she is sent to work alongside Steed to find the real culprit. Mother's second-in-command, Father, claims that Peel has dissociative identity disorder. The duo visits Sir August de Wynter, a former Ministry scientist. He takes an instant liking to Peel, as they both share a love of weather.
Steed and Peel follow a lead to Wonderland Weather, a business that artificially creates heat or rain with a special machine, where they discover two dead men in teddy bear suits. The members of a secret organization, led by de Wynter, all don teddy bear suits to disguise their identities. One of them, however, looks exactly like Peel. Steed arrives in time to save Peel, as the double jumps off a roof and disappears.
Steed and Peel go off to visit de Wynter at his mansion but are attacked by mechanical bees. An elderly Ministry agent, Alice, helps them to flee; nevertheless, de Wynter captures, drugs, hypnotizes, and sexually assaults Peel while she's in a barely coherent state. When de Wynter is later distracted, Peel tries to escape but feels faint and finds herself trapped due to the mansion's ever-changing floor plan. Becoming desperate, she smashes her way through the wall where Steed then finds her unconscious and rescues her. Back at Steed's apartment, Peel wakes up and is fired by Steed. However, Peel is arrested by Father, while Steed visits Invisible Jones, a man inside The Ministry, to investigate the meaning of a map found at Wonderland Weather.
After viewing photos of failed genetic experiments including cloning (revealing that the other Emma Peel is a clone), Steed determines Father is working alongside de Wynter. Father and the Peel clone gas Peel unconscious but are confronted by Mother, whom they incapacitate. De Wynter, controlling the weather using Prospero, confronts the world leaders, boasting that he controls the weather and they will have to buy the weather from him at great expense. He gives them a midnight ultimatum.
Father and the clone take Peel to a hot air balloon, where she regains consciousness and escapes during a snowstorm. Father and the clone perish when the balloon collides with the Wonderland Weather sign. Once reunited, Steed and Peel share a kiss. Jones determines de Wynter is using the Prospero instruments on a secret island, and Peel and Steed travel there to stop him. Peel defuses the Prospero device just as a hurricane forms over London. Steed duels de Wynter and impales him with his own cane, causing de Wynter to be disintegrated by a powerful bolt of lightning. The duo escapes just as the base self-destructs, and rendezvous with Mother on the roof of a building.
Cast
Production
Producer Jerry Weintraub had acquired the entirety of the Thorn EMI library including The Avengers in the mid 1980s. Weintraub subsequently sold most of the Thorn EMI properties such as Thunderbirds, The Prisoner, and The Persuaders! to PolyGram but held onto The Avengers as he felt it had potential. The film was originally scheduled to open earlier in June 1998, but was pushed back until August, often referred to as the "dumping ground" for films that are not felt to be strong enough to open on the more lucrative holiday weekends in early summer.
Reception
Box office
The Avengers ranked third in its opening weekend behind Saving Private Ryan and How Stella Got Her Groove Back, with $10,305,957. The film ultimately grossed $23,384,939 in the United States and Canada and $31.3 million internationally for a worldwide total of $54.7 million. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of D on an A+ to F scale.
Fans disliked the film for its disrespect to the series (particularly the introduction of a romance between Steed and Peel — previously a carefully ambiguous subject). Newcomers were lost by all of the misfired attempts to capture the mood of the original. Rod Dreher in the New York Post called the film "a big fat gob of maximum crapulosity, the kind of shallow, stupid, big-budget cow pile that smells of Joel Schumacher", referring to the previous summer's likewise poorly received Batman & Robin, also starring Thurman. David Bianculli stated: "This Avengers film is so horrendously, painfully, and thoroughly awful that it gives other cinematic clunkers like Ishtar and Howard the Duck a good name." Reception in Britain was equally hostile. The Birmingham Post wrote "The Avengers is being slated by critics as the worst film ever made - such a turkey, says one, that the makers should have handed distribution to (mass turkey producer) Bernard Matthews". Alan Jones in The Radio Times said "the cult 1960s TV series gets royally shafted by Hollywood in this stunningly designed blockbuster that's stunningly awful in every other department... Terrible special effects and zero chemistry between Fiennes and Thurman make this notorious disaster a total waste of everyone's time and energy".
Several critics noted that despite the film being written by Englishman Don Macpherson, the American production team fatally misunderstood the symbols of "Britishness" central to The Avengers series, such as the inclusion of an inexplicable gadget on the dashboard of Steed's Bentley, which appeared to dispense tea, with milk already added.
Commenting on the truncated released cut, The New York Timess Janet Maslin noted: "At a pared-down, barely rational 90 minutes, The Avengers is short but not short enough".
Accolades
The Avengers was nominated for nine Razzies at the 19th Golden Raspberry Awards: Picture, Director, Screenplay, Supporting Actor (Connery), Actress (Thurman), Actor (Fiennes), Screen Couple (Fiennes and Thurman) and Original Song ("Storm"), winning only one for Worst Remake or Sequel.
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| Worst Director
| Jeremiah Chechik
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| Worst Screenplay
| Don Macpherson
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| Worst Actor
| Ralph Fiennes
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| Worst Actress
| Uma Thurman
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| Worst Supporting Actor
| Sean Connery
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| Worst Screen Couple
| Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman
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| Worst Original Song
| "Storm" by Grace Jones
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| Worst Remake or Sequel
| The Avengers
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| rowspan="8"|Stinker Award
| Worst Picture
| The Avengers
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| rowspan="8" style="text-align:center;"|
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| Worst Director
| Jeremiah Chechik
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| Worst Actor
| Ralph Fiennes
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| Worst Actress
| Uma Thurman
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| Worst Supporting Actor
| Sean Connery
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| Worst On-Screen Couple
| Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman
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| Most Annoying Fake Accent
| Uma Thurman
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| Worst Resurrection of a TV Show
| The Avengers
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Novelization
The film's original script was used for its novelization (written by Julie Kaewert) and included all the material which was first shot and then removed from the film.
See also
- List of 20th century films considered the worst