THE AVENGERS (1998)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

In my same-day review of a 1960s AVENGERS episode, I noted one of the main appeals of the series:

...a lot of the stories seem dedicated to the proposition that, if outsiders think the English are stodgy while others think them eccentric, it's better to be thought the latter than the former.

Perhaps this is merely my own justification as to why I think the 1998 attempt to revive the Steed and Peel franchise failed so utterly. Though the credited writer of AVENGERS was British while director Jeremiah Checkick was the next best thing (i.e., Canadian), neither of them seemed to get that much of the TV show's appeal was how faithfully it appealed to the sheer artifice of English cultural tropes. The result was an AVENGERS that felt like any old American-made splashy summer action movie.

The filmmakers compounded this tone-deafness by attempting to sell their recreation as an "origin story" for Steed (Ralph Fiennes) and Peel (Uma Thurman). In the sixties teleseries, one never knows how Steed recruits any of his civilian assets, except for the very first season, which depicted the origin of Steed's partnership with one David Keel. The later seasons, in which the assets are "just there" at Steed's behest, served to give the show a sense of flamboyant escapism, in which Steed and his civilian buddies could drop all references to routine daily life in order to run off and investigate peculiar murders.

Instead, Macpherson's script shows "meteorologist" Emma Peel being brought to account by Steed's unnamed government agency because she's suspected of sabotaging Project Prospero, the government's attempt to control the weather. In the real world, being suspected of traitorous activity would probably get one dumped in a cell without a trial. However, Steed, who instantly takes a liking to the foxy maybe-widow, talks his boss into letting Mrs. Peel share the investigation with him. 

Narrative continuity was certainly savaged by the studio cutting the film to present a shorter (and potentially more profitable) running time, so audiences may never know why the real villain-- mad scientist August de Wynter (Sean Connery)-- is the one behind all the sabotage, or why he somehow created a clone of Mrs. Peel in order to lay the blame on her. Still, Chechick and Macpherson not only made the bad decision to mold their version of the franchise into an origin-story no one wanted, they also build up a "will-they-won't-they" romance between the co-stars, which contradicted the sexual ambiguity in the original Steed-Peel relationship.

In the midst of this debacle, it's not surprising that the actors aren't able to communicate anything but empty gestures. Ralph Fiennes strives with might and main to make his Steed seem like a cultured English gentleman who can drop all pretense of gentility for a sword-duel, but his performance never seems natural. Uma Thurman apparently appreciated the iconicity of Emma Peel, and so tries to duplicate the character's wry humor, but the script gives her mostly witless lines. She handles the sexy stuntwork adequately, though. Connery blusters a lot but his character is an empty mad scientist stereotype, and it's not even clear what he wants to do, in contrast to a weather-controlling analogue in the AVENGERS episode "A Surfeit of H20." The closest thing MacPherson comes to the TV show's constant mining of eccentricities is a scene in which a group of Wynter's colleagues conceal their identities by dressing up in teddy bear costumes. Yet this attempt at weirdness just comes out of nowhere, while in the TV show, there's always some method behind even minor madnesses.

As an homage to the cult TV show, the Chechick-Macpherson AVENGERS is a total bust. I suppose I thought it was modestly entertaining back in the day, but only if I viewed it as just a splashy summer action movie not connected to any previous franchise.