They Never Shut Up About Tea, Either By Fearless Young Orphan The Avengers (1998) Directed by Jeremiah S. Chechik I don’t think I’d get much argument that The Avengers is an awful movie. It’s quite a colorful catastrophe. But I can’t bring myself to detest it, or even dislike it really. Of my many Chunks experiences, this is an unusual one, where I got the distinct feeling that we were about two steps away from a really good film. Failure when there was such obvious potential is more disappointing than failure when there’s nothing to work with. And of course, The Avengers is so ostentatious and ridiculous that you can’t even pretend to ignore its drastic missteps. As a contrast, the movie Places in the Heart is a fine film that touched me deeply, but it commits a rather elementary plotting error that lessens its overall worth. Yet, because it is a quiet drama, which purposely eschews any flash in favor of fine acting and a strong human message, one can get to the end of the film and only remember the quality. That trick doesn’t work with something as boisterous as The Avengers. The Avengers is based on the extremely popular 1960s British television series by the same name, which many of us came to love in syndication. If you haven’t been exposed to the television program, most of what the movie is trying to do will be completely lost on you. But to summarize it quick-and-dirty, The Avengers was a rather silly show of skilled secret agents keeping England safe against egomaniacal supervillains with science-fictiony doomsday devices (something like The Prisoner in tone, but not as paranoid). Thanks to the dry British wit of the writing, most of this over-the-top craziness sounded quite a bit more reasonable than it was. “A world dominating weather-machine? I say, that’s jolly unsporting of him!” The most popular pair of agents from the series was John Steed and Emma Peel, who had chemistry out the wazoo and were both so fun, clever, and obviously terrific that you’d enjoy watching them do any damn thing. This chemistry, which could possibly be spun as romantic, achieved the more elusive and compelling quality of friendship. They really liked and respected each other. And maybe they also had sex, and maybe they didn’t, but this was the 1960s and it was none of our business. Besides, there’s no hanky-panky on the job. That simply isn’t proper. While writing this review, I went briefly back to some episodes of The Avengers from 1967, just to make sure my youthful memories weren’t being clouded. But I wasn’t kidding myself. One episode I watched was called “From Venus With Love.” A group of English astronomers are planning to launch a satellite to the planet Venus, but they are being picked off by a mysterious, murderous light, which leaves them grey-haired and dead. Steed and Mrs. Peel go undercover with the society, the members of which believe that Earth is being invaded by Venus. Well, it turns out that it was all the dirty work of an optical surgeon who was killing people with an eye-surgery laser he had mounted to the hood of his car, and he nearly killed Mrs. Peel too! But of course Steed saved her (this is a 50/50 thing with them; she saves him about equally often). So you see, it’s all quite silly, but the charming duo of Mrs. Peel and Steed had such a great time together. They react naturally to all this strangeness as if it was exactly that: quite a lot of eyebrow-raising strangeness. They must solve this problem so that British Astronomy will live to stargaze another day. The budget was probably $1,500, the fight scenes were so corny I had to laugh, and some of the scenery looked ready to topple over. But that 51 minutes of an old TV show had twice the energy and fun that The Avengers movie ever allowed itself. Resources aren’t really the problem for the remake. The Avengers has a big-name cast in place: Ralph Fiennes is secret agent John Steed. Fiennes always comes across a wee bit psychotic to me, even when he’s playing nice guys like he did in Quiz Show. Uma Thurman is Emma Peel, an expert recruited to Steed’s organization. Sean Connery is super-villain Sir August De Wynter (who controls the weather, if you could not guess his motif by his name). They are joined by the likes of Jim Broadbent and Fiona Shaw. As is apparent from the lavish sets and effects, there was a fair amount of cash to spend. The material too was readily available, seeing as the movie did in fact borrow several scenes right out of the television program. So director Chechik seemed to have some clue as to what he was doing. If anything, we could fault the film for having an abundance of resources without a clear plan of action. Movies based on popular old franchises bug the hell out of me, but it’s not because I’m protective of my beloved memories. What bothers me is that nine times out of ten, the makers of these films seem to be doing it merely to have a recognizable name for the title, which will generate box office income. They do not subsequently seem interested in hiring anyone who ever loved or knew the franchise, so that whoever ends up making the product detaches it from everything that made the original franchise cherished. Or, even more disappointingly, the makers often employ the franchise in-name-only and completely change everything else, giving me the impression that there was a generic, rough-draft script floating around, then someone picked it up and said, “This crime drama sucks, but if we set it on an uncharted desert isle and rename the cop Gilligan, we won’t have to think of a tagline.” I have seen two franchise-redos that managed to avoid these pitfalls. One was Starsky & Hutch, which took the TV show’s plot and style, then made itself into a rather good comedy. The other, and the best of them all, is the comic masterpiece The Brady Bunch Movie. Its stroke of genius was transporting the goody-two-shoes Bradys, clothes and all, into modern-day L.A. and having them go about their sugar-coated business without a clue that there’s anything odd about them, while bystanders stare in disbelief. I think The Avengers came awfully close to being nearly that good, and sadly missed the mark thanks to underlying miscalculations, like when NASA got inches and centimeters mixed up. Math is hard! So, what were the missteps? 1. The final, mutilated cut of the film. This is the fault of the studio. Originally The Avengers was about forty minutes longer. Test audiences hated it, so the movie was cut to 89 minutes. This decision is baffling, as I cannot fathom how they thought it might help. What resulted was a movie that people still hated, which now made very little sense. In the severely edited version, all sorts of things are said or done and you’ll not understand why. People arrive in places and we don’t know how they got there, or why they went. Characters inexplicably know things and we can’t understand how. The continuity is completely trashed. So yes, I could complain at length about the immensely confusing story arc, but that would be like making fun of someone in a wheelchair. The movie has been chopped apart. At full length, would it have been any better? Who knows? Rumors floated around about a director’s cut, but the movie was such a financial failure that it seems doubtful anyone would bother to do it. 2. Fabulous clothes do not equal fabulous characters. In the television show, Steed and Mrs. Peel dressed immaculately, and she was always at the height of fashion. Of course, everybody remembers Mrs. Peel’s justifiably famous black leather cat suit, in which Diana Rigg just looked fantastic. But the fact that they dressed well was merely a component of their characters, and was something that these classy people would do naturally. The costume designers for the film went to considerable trouble to make Steed and Mrs. Peel look terrific, and even villain Sir De Wynter appears in a full Highland dress tartan that is a showstopper. But people in incredible clothes are of no more value to us than a Bloomingdale’s catalog if all they seem to be doing is modeling incredible clothes. 3. Fabulous set design does not equal intrigue. The movie’s sets, like its costumes, are quite gorgeous. But all the castles, and funhouse rooms, and views of London, and chic apartments in the world just mean that we’ve put down our Bloomingdale’s catalogue and picked up a Better Homes and Gardens. The people within them are still wandering aimlessly, fulfilling purposes at which we can only guess. 4. Casting. Or Acting. Or . what? I’ve heard some grousing about the three leads: that they were miscast, that Uma Thurman was awful, that Sean Connery embarrassed himself. You know how people talk when they don’t like a movie. Personally I don’t have an issue with the actors chosen to play the parts. I think they’re all up to the task.