2023 Movie Challenge Week 13 Recap

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This week’s movie category was a Movie Based on or Turned Into a Television Series and while there are plenty out there to choose from, I decided to give a little old 90s movie a shot.

The Avengers was a film I remember wanting to see when it first came out. As I mentioned in my previous post, I thoroughly enjoyed Sean Connery’s performance in The Rock, having not seen much of his Bond work up to that point. I’m also not afraid to admit that I was a teenage boy at the time, and the trailer and poster for the film featured Uma Thurman quite prominently, dressed in a very tight fitting catsuit. This was right on the heels of her portrayal of Poison Ivy in Batman & Robin, so the creators were playing on that familiarity.
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Now, while Thurman remains lovely to this day, I was less interested in her outfit choices for the film, but a bit surprised to find the aforementioned catsuit only appears in the final 10-15 minutes of the film. Marketing leads us astray once again.

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​But to the film itself, while it’s based on a popular British TV series from the 1960s, the story is quite disjointed and does a strong disservice to the source material. Ralph Fiennes stars as agent John Steed opposite Thurman’s Dr. Emma Peel. The pair are tasked with stopping Sir August de Wynter (Connery) in his attempts to use technology to create a bitter storm over London. I don’t want to spend any more time on the plot, because that’s about all there is to it, with much of the film laid out in short sequences that would feel more at home in a half hour television spot than in a feature film. It truly feels like an series of comic book episodes rather than a fully fleshed out film.

Dr. Emma Peel (Uma Thurman) and John Steed (Ralph Fiennes) look for their nemesis.

​The sad thing about the film is that if you just looked at the cast, you’d thing it was a top-notch production. Beyond Fiennes, Thurman, and Connery, there are appearances by Jim Broadbent as Mother and Fiona Shaw as Father, the leaders of the spy agency as well as an early film appearance from Eddie Izzard as de Wynter’s henchman Bailey. His only line in the film (“Oh, fuck!”) comes near the end and is probably one of the few moments I actually laughed out loud. In terms of the rest of the dialogue, get ready for tons of eyeroll inducing double entendres and clichés that have not aged well in the 25 years since the film debuted. Even with the all-star cast, they were not able to save these lines from sounding utterly ridiculous throughout. I did however enjoy the preunion (my new word as the opposite of a reunion) of Broadbent, Shaw, and Fiennes in the film who would all appear in various Harry Potter films a few years later.

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Sir August de Wynter (Sean Connery) is just as ridiculous as his name and this teddy bear costume would indicate.

​I wrote extensively on last week’s film, The Birth of a Nation, despite only rating it a 3 out of 10. This film falls into the same category but without the benefit of cinematic innovation. There is literally nothing to recommend in this film, and it probably could have rated lower, but I feel that would be a disservice to the tremendous names in the cast. If you really want an Avengers fix, check out the television series which is available on Amazon Prime or just skip this movie by that title and watch Marvel’s The Avengers. Despite any failings of the Marvel films, they are infinitely better than this movie.

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