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The Avengers Year: 1998 |
Watching a movie like this always depresses me. Not that the content was a downer, but unfulfilled potential is hard for me to take, and this movie was chock full of it. I've seen a few of episodes of the original Avengers , so I have some idea of what kind of show it was. The movie tried to maintain the quick reparté between John Steed and Emma Peel, but there are scripting problems. I swear, the actors' copies were filled with lines like, "At this point, Steed thinks this". Unfortunately, without appropriate voice-overs (which, admittedly, would have killed the tone of the movie), the audience is left wondering, and the pace of the dialogue is so fast, we don't have time to absorb one exchange and figure out what was not said before the next is upon us. This is also the first movie I have ever seen where I could actually tell where they edited. Steed and Peel's entrance into de Wynter's lair, the famous "How now brown cow" line, was completely unprecendented in the movie. At the end of the duel between Steed and de Wynter, Steed is bleeding and worse for wear, but how that came about is left to the audience's imagination. I did a bit of digging online as research for this review, and came across a website that actually detailed the cut scenes. Suddenly the movie made a whole pile more sense! There is a petition in the works to have an Avengers Director's cut released, and though it probably will never happen, it would make all the difference to this movie.
That's the story and scripting. The actors did what they could with what they were given. Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman were decent in their roles, and it wasn't their fault that the writer gave in to the romantic tension that makes all good television shows and movie series (and I believe they did want to make this into a series) fun to watch. I have never seen Sean Connery overact the way he did in this movie, though. It was like he enjoyed the thought of playing the anti-Bond so much, he forgot how to put in a good performance. De Wynter was over the top, so blatantly psychopathic in all his dealings with people that it's a wonder that he wasn't locked up years ago, and severely under-developed. Again, the cut scenes would have helped in this respect, but Connery was just so... bad! The other supporting characters, however, were well worth it. Mother and Father were hilarious, once you learned to understand Mother's accent. And Alice with her Tommy gun! They aren't nearly enough to make the movie good, though.
As for the fencing, was it good or was it bad? Honestly, I can't tell. The first instance of it was a friendly bout between Steed and Peel as his new suit is being finished. Witty reparté aside, it didn't seem too bad, but pieces of furniture and architecture kept getting in the way. The same was true of the final duel between Steed and de Wynter. Not only did the editor hack the heart out of the duel, so we never saw it, but the remaining footage was mostly from an way back, over-the-action perspective, too far away to really talk about how good it was. Can Ralph Fiennes fence? I'll let you know once I see and review Sunshine. From what I saw in this film, he's not bad, but that's stage fencing. William Hobbs was also the sword master for The Count of Monte Cristo.
Needless to say, I came out of this movie unhappy. A less murderous job by the editor, a little less speed to the dialogue, a little more said than not, and DON'T give in to romantic tension, and I could probably have given it a better rating than I did. Is it worth your time to watch? Opinions vary on it. In the end, all I can really say is, they tried.
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