All The World's A Stage - The Work of Ralph Fiennes

[Mary Frances]

The Avengers

By Jacqueline McGregor
Sunday Mirror (UK)
August 23, 1998

YET another camp 60s TV series gets a 90s re-vamp. This time it's The Avengers which rise from the ashes.

Ralph Fiennes plays the bowler-hatted John Steed while the statuesque Uma Thurman squeezes into Emma Peel's catsuit.

The duo are members of a select secret service unit called The Ministry.

They handle threats to the nation's safety with good manners, style and copious amount of tea.

Their wheelchair-bound macaroon munching commander, known simply as Mother, has a dangerous new assignment for them. They must save the world - again. But of course for Steed and Peel this is all in a day's work.

Sir August De Wynter, a megalomaniac played by a kilt clad Sean Connery, threatens to destroy the planet with his weather machine which he's named The Prospero project.

Snowdrifts, tornadoes evil clones, giant, karate kicking teddies and robotic insects complete the plot.

No, I'm not taking drugs, this film is a combination of Alice in Wonderland meets The Tempest.

The film is set in a surreal, time-warped Britain. The special effects are spectacular as The Avengers battle against the elements - fighting off baddies with cool dignity - but the chemistry between Fiennes and Thurman really could barely be described as electric.

As a die-hard Avengers fan, this movie wasn't my cup of tea, but decide for yourself if these Avengers are still the best of British.

[Mary Frances]

http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117477761.html?categoryid=31&cs=1&p=0

The Avengers

By GODFREY CHESHIREA
Variety
August 14, 1998

While not the complete calamity that Warner Bros.' refusal to press-screen it suggested, "The Avengers" is a pretty thin cuppa Earl Grey. Costing upward of $60 million yet running less than 90 minutes including credits, pic, which was bumped from its original June opening to this late-summer dumping ground, makes a game effort at reviving the popular '60s British spy serial and boasts plenty of surface sparkle, including a witty look and super-duper special effects. What's missing is chemistry: the right blend of seriousness and whimsy, and charmingly compelling interplay between leads Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman, who turn in lackluster perfs. Fast-paced but uninvolving, the result seems unlikely to captivate either series fans or newcomers, making for dim B.O. prospects.

Further proof that an old TV franchise and a couple of current stars don't equal foolproof celluloid fun, pic perhaps doomed itself in trying for fidelity to the series, which remains wholly bound to the evanescent pop culture of the '60s. The makers might have been better off taking a page from Mike Myers, whose "Austin Powers" provides a convincing simulation of '60s giddiness while filtering it through a scrim of knowing '90s mockery.

"The Avengers," in contrast, assumes incorrectly that the old formulas can simply be replayed without irony or updating. Its super-sleuths, John Steed (Fiennes) and Emma Peel (Thurman), still live in a depopulated, traditional-gone-mod London, awaiting the next opportunity to save Blighty from the latest outlandish threat posed by eccentricity run amok.

Steed, the one with the Savile Row suit, bowler hat and lethal bumbershoot, works for a secret government arm called the Ministry. His controllers, the paradoxically monikered Mother (Jim Broadbent) and Father (Fiona Shaw), bring him together with the chic, agile Mrs. Peel to combat the predation of an out-of-control project called Prospero, which threatens to wreak havoc on Britain's weather.

Mrs. Peel herself is initially suspected of being a player in Prospero's mischief, until it's revealed that she has an evil double who's working for the baddies. The chief culprit, meanwhile, is the climatologically monikered Sir August de Wynter (Sean Connery), a maniacal aristo who lives on a surreal estate (played by Blenheim Palace) and who plans to reduce Britain to an arctic wasteland unless the nation agrees to fork over 10% of its GNP.

The plot's further unfurling, not surprisingly, involves lots of chases, high-tech gimmickry and heavy weather. A la the current generation of American sci-fi spectacles, we get to see another nation's urban landmarks gleefully trashed: Big Ben explodes in flames and, best of all, Trafalgar Square gets blanketed by a blizzard.

Director Jeremiah Chechick handles the visual and logistical aspects of all this with a credible amount of polish and verve. He's ably abetted by Roger Pratt's handsome lensing. But pic's most stellar contributor, unquestionably, is production designer Stuart Craig, who provides an imaginative look that deftly balances the '60s and the '90s, mod and postmod, abstract and concrete.

Don Macpherson's script tries for the same, but its version of the Steed-Peel pas de deux is like champagne that's lost its fizz, which turns out to be the pic's most damning deficit. And though it was perhaps a thankless task from the outset, given how much the characters owed both to the zeitgeist and to the actors who originally played them (Patrick Macnee and, in Mrs. Peel's most popular incarnation, the luminous Diana Rigg), it must be said that Fiennes and Thurman do little to animate the inert material they're handed.

Fiennes is bland and wimpy where rectitude and aplomb are needed. And Thurman does little more than give millions of guys reason to sigh, "Well, she's no Diana Rigg."

Connery, meanwhile, is both underused and overdone. But there's fun had in the background by supporting players including Shaw and comic Eddie Izzard, who plays a baddie. Macnee, the original Steed, provides a brief vocal cameo.

[Mary Frances]

http://www.slate.com/id/3262

The Avengers

By David Edelstein
Slate
August 21, 1998

I don't know who the credited screenwriter, Don MacPherson, is, but it's unlikely that he has ever seen an episode of the old Avengers, let alone sussed out the source of its appeal. Opening with a slapstick sequence of agent John Steed (Ralph Fiennes) doing kung fu, the film shifts to a scene in which he meets Mrs. Peel (Uma Thurman) while sitting naked in a sauna with only a newspaper to cover his private parts. The series was erotic in a way only prim English humor can be: The Old Boy Steed was capable of throwing a punch and bonking someone with his bowler, but he left the karate kicking to his liberated, leather-suited distaff associate. Here their roles have been witlessly muddled, and MacPherson's idea of banter is to have the pair complete each other's clichés.

Whereas the original Steed, Patrick Macnee, was to the English Men's Club born, Fiennes is an eternal caddie. The willowy Thurman looks great in her outfits, but it's ever more apparent that she isn't much of an actress--at least, not a trained one--and her attempts at insouciance are embarrassingly arch. As the eccentric master villain who controls the weather, even Sean Connery is flat-out terrible, acting high on the hog. To think Connery once found the Bond films so far beneath him! When he sputters lines like "Time to die!" one imagines Dr. No, Goldfinger, and Blofeld snickering in the wings.

[Mary Frances]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/e/a/1998/08/15/STYLE10245.dtl

"Avengers': Deadly

By Barbara Shulgasser
San Francisco Examiner
August 15, 1998

Witty TV show is just one more special-effects blowout on film

JUST AS A little point of information for you movie fans out there, often studios have an inkling that a movie they've spent lots of money making isn't completely, altogether, entirely, well, good. Usually when that is the case, they spend a great deal more money flying journalists all over the country to junkets where they put them in fancy hotel rooms, wine and dine them, show them the movie, and let them talk to the stars and director for a minute or two.

In other words, they ignore how bad the thing is and proceed as if nothing were wrong. But there are gradations of badness. When a movie is terribly bad, the studios postpone screening it for the press until the night before the opening, leaving little time for papers with early deadlines to run a review on opening day (usually a Friday). The studio hopes to enjoy an opening weekend with no bad reviews to influence the public.

Now, when a movie is really, really bad, they don't screen it at all. Reviewers must go to the theaters on Friday and run back to the office to write for Saturday, a day many people don't see a newspaper.

This was the case with "The Avengers."

Let me just say that I can't argue with the studio's reasoning.

Based on the 1960s cult television series about two urbane and appealing British secret agents for The Ministry starring Patrick Macnee and (mostly) Diana Rigg, the movie is a dismal and misguided special-effects romp featuring two of the deadest performances recorded this year so far.

Ralph Fiennes stars as John Steed, the man with the bowler hat, umbrella and bullet-proof three-piece suits. Uma Thurman plays Mrs. Peel, a martial-arts expert with a penchant for tight leather costumes and tight-lipped badinage.

It doesn't help that the dialogue, written by Don Macpherson, is some of the lamest I've heard since my best friend in the fourth grade learned how to make a pun.

The TV series posed an alternative to the James Bondian shoot-'em-up sort of action. It gave us agents who used wit, intelligence and an air of superiority to best their foes. With Fiennes and Thurman in the leads, I think the strategy in the movie is to bore their enemies into submission.

Scenes between the two seem to go on forever while they quietly utter inanities as if the lines were funny. At one point they walk through a maze and Mrs. Peel remarks that it's "amazing."

Fiennes and Thurman are dark, dry, rigid and affectless. I think the "Alice in Wonderland" quality of the TV series has been replaced here by a sensibility more familiar with the 1960s "Batman" TV show. Holy Stiff Upper Lip!

Sean Connery is August De Wynter, a former Ministry employee currently gone mad and threatening to rule the world's weather unless everyone pays him to make it sunny. His obsession is the occasion for director Jeremiah Chechik (is it possible he made the lovely "Benny and Joon" ?) displaying the kind of special effects that belong in "Twister" and seem absurdly out of place here.

The TV series was a character-driven entertainment about two charming spies. The movie is an idiocy-driven 90 minutes of torture dreamed up by people who have no new ideas of their own, but who believe that even when they steal old ideas, they can do them better than the smart people who thought them up first.

[Mary Frances]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/1998/08/15/DD68978.DTL

'Avengers' Is a Crime

Bad casting, poor direction rob remake of '60s series panache

By Mick LaSalle
San Francisco Chronicle
August 15, 1998

Mr. Steed has never been in a bad mood till now. Then again, he's never had so good a reason.

``The Avengers,'' a '90s Hollywood-style version of the cheeky '60s TV series about special agents battling mad-hatter villains, opened yesterday, after being hidden by Warner Bros. in order to avoid reviews in the Friday papers. It's a completely botched effort -- botched in its direction, its writing and editing.

The casting doesn't help. For months, all the talk has centered on Uma Thurman as Emma Peel, the role that made a thinking man's text icon out of Diana Rigg, the leather- jumpsuit clad adventuress. Uma is Uma. She's not bad. She's not Rigg, but we're adults and we can live with that.

The problem is Fiennes. True, like Patrick Macnee, who originated the role on television, he has a warm, rather nasal British accent. But Macnee's natural rhythms were fast; Fiennes' are slow. Macnee was cheerful and unflappable; Fiennes is brooding, contemplative, melancholy and wistful. Worst of all, Fiennes is young. He's like a spoiled welp as Steed, not a seasoned, dapper man of the world.

This has two consequences, both bad. First, it makes Steed a sexual possibility for Emma. Their clipped, Noel Coward-like banter, which, in the series, suggested two people on a unique wavelength, is reduced to banal flirting. Second, it makes Steed very unappealing when compared to the villain, played by Sean Connery.

Just a question: If you were walking down the street and saw Fiennes and Connery brawling, which one would you root for? My guess is that half the people would stand on the sidelines rooting for Connery, while the other half would jump in to help beat up Fiennes.

``The Avengers'' is in trouble from the beginning. Steed and Emma meet and trade barbs, but their manner isn't crisp. It's slow and aren't-we-clever. They don't seem confident but self-conscious. Where was the director? Right on the set no doubt: The picture was directed by Jeremiah Chechik, who presided over the disastrous American remake of ``Diabolique.''

There are long, expository scenes designed to let us know that an evil genius (Connery) has devised a way to take control of the weather -- and that Emma and Steed have to stop him. There's also some business involving a dead ringer for Emma going around causing trouble, and there's some mention of the word ``cloning.'' Then all talk of that is dropped.

Everything is dropped. After a slow opening, the 90-minute movie jolts into climax mode. What happened to the middle? Clearly, this wasn't just edited but gutted. No doubt they did us all a favor, but it doesn't help. Instead of just being a bad picture, the missing middle makes ``The Avengers'' a bad and weird and strangely off picture.

One example: There's never a moment when Emma and Steed realize who the villain is. At first, they don't know. Next they're in a titanic battle to the death. At one point Emma is shackled and floating around in a hot-air balloon. I don't know how she got there. I must have blinked.

The movie throws in a special-effects sequence of a Connery- generated tornado blowing across London. It's no big deal at all. It's like every other special effect we've ever seen.

British comic Eddie Izzard shows up as one of Connery's thugs, but he only has one word of dialogue. It's almost funny.

Connery's presence is sprinkled throughout, and he has the best scenes -- solely because Sean Connery is in them. He walks into a meeting of various world powers, wearing a kilt, and announces, ``From now on you will buy your weather from me.''

It makes sense: If you're going to walk through a role, walk through it wearing a kilt.

[Mary Frances]

http://www.nytimes.com/library/film/081598avengers-film-review.html

'The Avengers': Shh! They're Trying Not to Be Noticed

By JANET MASLIN
The New York Times
August 15, 1998

Sometimes major movie studios should be afraid to screen expensive fiascos for the press, but they go ahead anyway. "The Avengers" is Warner Brothers' would-be blockbuster that has actually had its light hidden beneath a bushel until opening day, and no wonder. With pseudo-suave repartee that would make Austin Powers blush and with so many shades of "Howard the Duck" that one scene depicts man-size pastel teddy bears sitting around a conference table, it's a film to gall fans of the old television series and perplex anyone else. I can't remember another Friday morning show where I heard actual cries of "Ugh!" on the way out the door.

With a perfect lack of chemistry between them, Uma Thurman and Ralph Fiennes play Mrs. Peel and John Steed, the woman in the catsuit and the man who fights boldly with his umbrella. To put it mildly, the dandified Fiennes does not look capable of inflicting serious damage with that bumbershoot, and Ms. Thurman had a better costume-party role as Poison Ivy in "Batman Forever." Also in the cast, as a madman scheming grandly to control the weather, is Sean Connery. Connery has what is surely the silliest line of his entire, distinguished career: "Rain or shine, it's all mine!" Dressed and wigged in mock-glamorous fashion, Connery has never looked more like Burt Reynolds.

As directed by Jeremiah Chechik and written as a parade of comic book stunts and terminally arch quips by Don Macpherson, this "Avengers" begins with scenes of tea being sipped in a roadster, then moves on to the gaudy destruction of London by evilly manipulated weather patterns. One nice thing about a story like this is that you know it's almost over when Big Ben blows up.

Also here are a cloned heroine ("The Parent Trap" does this better), a scene featuring an army of helicopter-like remote-controlled bug machines, and a refreshingly witty turn from Eileen Atkins as a proper English lady who wears pearls and carries a machine gun. And just for fun, the film has a weird male character called Mother (Jim Broadbent) and a weird female called Father (Fiona Shaw) who prompt the most horrible puns of all. As in "It really isn't Mother's day!" and "Mother knows best!" and so on.

At a pared-down, barely rational 100 minutes, "The Avengers" is short but not short enough.

[Mary Frances]

http://www.boxoffice.com/boxoffice_scr/movie_reviews_result.asp?terms=4138

The Avengers

By Kim Williamson
Box Office Magazine
(No date given)

Rating: 2.5/4 stars

With its moral apparently being not to eat the macaroons so favored by Mother (Jim Broadbent), the as-captured-here oddly inept head of a peculiarly downscale British ultra-top-secret agency The Ministry, "The Avengers" is part "Batman," part Bond, part "The Prisoner"--and even part "The Avengers," the zingy Thorn EMI TV series of the '60s. That 10-season show, several of whose incarnations were imported by ABC from 1966 to 1969, was most memorably graced by one of those lightning-in-a-bottle actor pairings, Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg. As the older, dapper John Steed, he of the Saville Row bowler hat and trusty bumbershoot, and Emma Peel, she of the Mod catsuit, independent air and jujitsu abilities, former Royal Navy man Macnee and Shakespearean actress Rigg played their characters too-lean-to-sweat but way-keen-on-tussling with a succession of eccentric malefactors. Of course, the duo always made time for two-seatering through the English countryside and for repartee that both exposed and held in check their perfectly equipoised passion for each other.

This 1998 updating sports Suffolk native Ralph Fiennes ("The English Patient"), who sounds right but looks improperly uncomfortable in his spruce suit, and Uma Thurman ("Batman & Robin"), who though she never seems like the product of New England she is never comes across as an offspring of Old England, either. And his Steed is stiff, not aristocratic; her Peel is all shape and sultry, not cinnamon-tart sparkly. In the movie's critical flaw, the filmmakers welsh even more on their ne'er-do-well, not due to any limitations of Scotsman Sean Connery but due to his character's sheer improbability. The storyline: On an island in the middle of London, an evil meteorologist named Sir August De Wynter (wink, wink) has constructed, apparently by himself and a single dragoon, and without discovery, a titanic structure that allows him to control the weather; unless world leaders give him 10 percent of their nations' gross national products, he will rake the earth with the heats of August and the snows of winter until the countries collapse. At times, De Wynter's strongholds seem impenetrable; at others, an old lady collecting donations can come right up to the front door.

Although the script by Britisher Don MacPherson ("Absolute Beginners") contains flashes of the urbane back-and-forthing required of a proper Steed and Peel, they are few, far between and of no great portent; the dialogue remains mostly a surface structure. There's little of the fun complexity of many Macnee-Rigg scenes, as in the episode when Steed, puzzled in some parlor room, asks, "What's that under this bear-skin rug?" and lifts a corner with the point of his umbrella; "bare skin," replies Rigg's Mrs. Peel, seeing revealed the naked body of a young woman. Multiple emotions are pacing there: Peel, she of the long-missing husband, can rightly feel no desires but does, and into that mix also goes her jealousy at Steed's male response to this other beauty; for his part, Steed is a battleground between oh-so-sophisticated control and illicit ardor for the married Peel--and yet he also notices what a babe this other gal is. (Or was; she's dead.) Fiennes and Thurman seem to play with a similar goal in mind, but the fervency of their aim and the script's lack of emotional motility produce a sort of character lockjaw. The zing isn't gone, but it's dampened--and all that sweating the new duo does doesn't help.

Aside from none-too-crisp looping and a cast list whose brevity makes this merry old England look positively depopulated, "The Avengers" is smartly produced studio fare, not surprising coming from the hands of seasoned producer Jerry Weintraub, who a decade ago already had a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame and a NATO producer of the year plaque hanging on his wall. But perhaps too smartly: Although Peel's Jag is quite right, for example, the overload of special effects at the film's finale goes against the grain of the urbane 'n' humane tradition of "The Avengers"--and it all seems little understood by director Jeremiah Chechik, who seems more made for the kooky and quirky on display in his best work, "Benny & Joon."

Held from an early-summer release, the final "The Avengers" likely is a recut, in that a second rating was required by the MPAA (a PG for action violence and some innuendo announced in May was replaced in August by the current PG-13 for brief strong language). It's certainly passable Hollywood fare, with the studio's decision not to screen the film for press more likely layable at the feet of formerly confident management whose cinematic assurance has been shaken by a long spell of no big hits and some high-profile misses. But, still, "The Avengers" is something of a pale copy of the past; a scene in which Macnee appears here as an invisible agent made barely discernible by a play of light upon him makes for a symbolic judgment on the enterprise.

[Mary Frances]

http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/reviews/1998/08/17review.html?CP=SAL&DN=110

Mrs. Peel, We're Needed

The fizzy, stylish charm of TV's inimitable "The Avengers"
is in short supply in the new film version, but fear not -- a video collection comes to the rescue.

By Charles Taylor
SALON
August 17, 1998

"'The Avengers' is about a man in a bowler hat and a woman who flings men over her shoulder." --Patrick Macnee

It was also about the couch. During Diana Rigg's first season as Mrs. Emma Peel on "The Avengers," her partner, John Steed (played by the estimable Patrick Macnee) lived in a bachelor flat appointed in a manner suiting an upper-class Brit with a military past: dark wood, a model ship, the occasional shield or sword or marble bust. And yet it's the couch I remember best, a large black one (or so it seemed, since the show was then in black and white) outlined in white piping, deep enough for two to comfortably stretch its length, their heads at opposite ends.

The couch made all that other manly folderol fade into the background. There's a picture of it in Macnee's recent memoir, "The Avengers and Me" that sums up its appeal. Steed and Mrs. Peel stretch out along its length, facing each other, he absorbed in some official-looking papers, she in one of the varied projects or sciences that occupied her. It's the most quotidian of images: a quiet evening at home. And yet there's nothing drab or routine about it. They're both dressed casually yet immaculately, he in a dark polo sweater and creased trousers, she in a sleeveless top and checked slacks, both in boots (propped up on the couch yet -- a no-no in my parents' house). Drinks are within easy reach on the table behind. It's a picture of contentment without complacency, comfort that doesn't sacrifice style, companionship that doesn't preclude individuality. To a kid encountering "The Avengers," it made grown-up life seem pretty damn good.

The people who insist that television influences kids are such overwhelmingly killjoys and do-gooders that I'm loath to admit they have a point. (I just don't happen to buy that TV's influence is inevitably pernicious.) Certainly "The Avengers" influenced me. The show's irony, style and sophisticated flippancy -- and the teasing, indefinable chemistry between Macnee and Rigg -- planted ideas that I believe in to this day. That equal friendships are possible between men and women without either denying their sexuality. That style is a form of ethics. That work should be play. That tradition and innovation can be integrated. That surfaces are both delightful and untrustworthy. That luxury and indulgence don't necessarily dull your responses. And that a drink before going out never hurt anybody.

To me, the Macnee/Rigg shows are "The Avengers." In Britain, "The Avengers" lasted six seasons, spanned almost the whole of the '60s and saw Steed teamed up with a variety of partners. America saw only the two Rigg seasons and the final one with Linda Thorson as Tara King. I've never seen the two seasons that preceded Rigg, with Honor Blackman as Cathy Gale (though A&E aired them earlier this decade), and probably unfairly, I've never given Thorson a chance.

"The Avengers" is definitely not the atrocity of the same name currently stinking up a theater near you. Luckily, there's a way to see examples of the real McCoy, in three boxed sets (a fourth will follow) that will cover the entire 1967 season -- the first season in color and Rigg's last -- lovingly remastered. The past few months have also seen the publication of Macnee's becomingly modest memoir (written with "Avengers"-ologist Dave Rogers, whose "The Complete Avengers" is a trove of information on the show's history, production and merchandise); Toby Miller's endearing academic exegesis "The Avengers"; and Alain Carraze and Jean-Luc Putheaud's lavish and handsome book "The Avengers Companion."

Macnee summed up the show more accurately than he may have realized. We get hooked on stories with recurring characters not for the plots but because the characters' habits and personalities endear them to us. Each new adventure becomes a chance for the characters to fulfill their personalities. "The Avengers" took that concept to outrageous extremes, particularly in the second Rigg season, by trading in the fantastic and bizarre -- each week brought a new evil genius with some comic-book baroque plan for ruling the world -- and then refusing to take any threat seriously. This approach let the show slip the noose of Cold War xenophobia that's long been the bane of espionage fiction.

Oh, there was "us" and "them" in "The Avengers," but often "they" were treated as friendly competitors. Queen and country may have benefited from Steed and Emma's exploits, but the duo was doing it for fun, not patriotism and its moldy connotations of duty. The summons that Steed sent to Emma at the beginning of most episodes -- the message "Mrs. Peel, we're needed" on engraved cards and microscope slides, on traffic lights and over her TV set -- was an invitation to a party. Why else, in the episode "From Venus With Love," do they change into evening clothes before visiting a crime scene? The credits sequence for the 1967 season illustrates the hedonist's version of beating swords into plowshares: Steed uses his umbrella sword to snare himself a boutonniere; Emma uses her gun to uncork champagne. Steed and Emma's adversaries were crazed free-agent baddies for the same reason the two had no defined links to British intelligence: It freed them from the dullness of bureaucrats. That was the territory of Le Carré and his heavy-spirited legion of gray men on both sides. "The Avengers" belong to the world of '60s pop, with its ironic juxtaposition of the familiar with the outlandish. (Among the things you could count on was at least one British eccentric per episode.)

"The Avengers" still seems fresh, when so many other ironic entertainments seem emotionally cowardly because the show was parodying the very genre devices it used (still a new idea at the time). "The Avengers" was able to preserve what we loved about the espionage genre while acknowledging the hackneyed conventions we couldn't ignore. Or, as Miller puts it, "Repetition offers dependable characteristics alongside the frisson of surprise that makes for distinctiveness." (Miller's book is sweet because he so clearly adores the show, yet, being a good academic, feels bound to make his often trenchant points using words like "tropes" and "signifiers.") Cliché trounces cliché in this exchange from "The Bird Who Knew Too Much," as Steed and Emma sift through pellets of birdseed in search of microfilm:

Steed: Do you know they brought over the whole Eastern rocket program in the eye of a needle?

Emma: Ingenious.

Steed: Except for the fact that the courier laid down and rested in a haystack.

Emma: You mean they ...

Steed (finishing her thought): They're still looking for it.

The show's arch tone defused any danger the pair faced and that allowed Emma to be such a groundbreaking character. Already strong, independent and intelligent, she went even further by refusing to be a victim. True, Steed rescued her now and then, but what seems more important is the way the writers put Emma in traditional damsel-in-distress situations only to have her respond without a sign of fear. Emma treated each threat as a mere annoyance, as something essentially beneath her. In "Escape Through Time" she faces a 16th century inquisitor who tells her that her Marie Antoinette get-up has been designed to inflame men with lust. Emma quips, "You should see me 400 years from now."

In a 1984 piece in London's Daily Telegraph, Maureen Paton wrote, "Back in the sixties all my class at school, boys and girls alike, fell hopelessly in love with Diana Rigg as Emma Peel in 'The Avengers.'" The genius of Rigg's portrayal was that she did what generations of male heroes had done: made sexiness inseparable from competence, confidence and professionalism. Emma does show fear in the course of the episodes where, separated from Steed, she's stranded with some maniac in a remote place. But those flashes of fright never seriously challenged her nerve or resolve. Rigg had the ability to turn absurd comic-book spy capers into high-style comedy. Like a perfect chardonnay, she was dry, crisp and tart in just the right combination. The only thing missing was the chill.

Wonderful as Rigg was, she leaves Patrick Macnee in constant danger of being overlooked. His "The Avengers and Me" is touching precisely because he's completely free of the resentment other actors have shown toward the roles that made them famous. Macnee knows he never topped John Steed, but he's grateful to have played the part, and for the affection he's earned because of it. Macnee played Steed with a glancing slyness -- innuendo held in check -- that he made seem amazingly easy. He's the Ginger Rogers of this partnership -- the one whose timing and snap and plain likability are essential to the final mix. If Emma's brand of irony lies in the way she sidesteps female vulnerability, Steed's lies in his subversion of the traditional English gentleman. In the course of the duo's investigations, Steed walked into every lion's den with undiminished good cheer and impeccable manners -- both masking the threat of someone not to be trifled with. He's a Wodehouse swell rewritten by Ian Fleming. In "Murdersville," he enters the pub of a small town where Emma, who's gotten word to him, is being held captive. Steed puts a sudden end to the small talk with the cheery non sequitur, "Mrs. Emma Peel." A startled barmaid sends a glass crashing to the floor. Steed smilingly explains, "Wanted to see your reaction." The fight that ensues is almost an afterthought. Steed's cunning and cheek have gotten the upper hand before a single blow has landed.

Emma and Steed offered an easy unity of the modern and the classic that was hard to come by in the '60s, while still embodying the decade's belief in creating your own life as you pleased, picking and choosing among the artifacts of the past and the present to achieve a new, seamless synthesis. Steed, ever ready to indulge in a glass of champagne or admire a young lovely who flits his way, wears his bowler and umbrella as both the trademark of a true gentleman and the ironic disguise of a born hedonist. Emma's chic, modern outfits (designed by John Bates and Alun Hughes) and her interest in modern art and design mark her as a member of her generation, while her scientific training links her to tradition.

From the moment they made their debut as a team, the chemistry between Macnee and Rigg has been the topic of endless did-they-or-didn't-they? speculation. (Even the stars themselves are divided: In recent separate interviews in TV Guide, he says of course; she says no.) Although a few quicksilver hints dropped in various episodes make it hard to think Steed and Emma didn't, their relationship seems best summed up by a character in Brian Morton's novel "Starting Out in the Evening": "She loved the way Mr. Steed would look at Mrs. Peel: a gaze that was appreciative but not acquisitive, a gaze filled with desire but without vulgarity ... though they were mad about each other they never touched; they made love only with their eyes." And, Morton might have added, with their banter, the interplay of their minds. We never proceeded past Steed and Emma's bedroom doors, but we got to see them make love every week.

Nothing of that sense of play makes it into the new big-screen version of "The Avengers." Directed by Jeremiah Chechik -- for whom, to paraphrase a colleague, a special circle of hell has since been reserved -- the film flails incoherently from set to set, trying to be kicky and madcap and pop, but with no sense of the show's casual acceptance of the absurd. Perhaps the utter impossibility of figuring out where the two of them are or what they're doing is the result of studio-ordered trimming, reportedly drastic. But you'd have to be mad to look at what's here and advise anyone to include more.

Maybe actors should be given some benefit of the doubt when they're directed by a total incompetent like Chechik, but everyone in "The Avengers" is stupefyingly awful. Ralph Fiennes, on whom Steed's bowler is neither a literal nor a figurative fit, is po-faced and stiff. As for Uma Thurman, this is the first time I've actively disliked her. Trying for comic haughtiness (Emma, haughty?) she comes off as prissy and snobbish. Worse, she violates the cardinal rule of her character: When in danger, she shows fear. The movie's utter charmlessness even stifles Sean Connery, who plays the villain, Sir August de Wynter. You can see why Warner Bros. refused to show this movie to critics before it opened. But why entrust the movie version of a show loved by millions to the director of "Diabolique" and "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" in the first place? The only thing preventing "The Avengers" from being a legendary Hollywood disaster is that the filmmakers have no idea of what legendary means.

In the end, Steed and Emma are as much states of mind as characters. In retrospect, the "Who's Who?" episode sums up the place they hold in the fantasy lives of the show's fans. Steed and Emma find themselves transported into the bodies of enemy agents, the irredeemably seedy Basil and Lola. Once these badduns have realized their scheme and wound up inside of Steed and Emma, an odd thing happens: Steed and Emma start to seem unaccountably shabby while Basil and Lola, hosts to the souls of Steed and Emma, begin to behave with something approaching dignity and aplomb. This is how Steed and Emma seem to those of us who still love the shows, years after their last adventure: as something to live up to, present even when only in spirit.

[Mary Frances]

http://www.eye.net/eye/issue/issue_08.20.98/film/onscreen.html

Taking a bite out of slime

THE AVENGERS

By Tom Lyons
Eye Weekly
August 20, 1998

Given the overwhelmingly negative response to The Avengers, it would be nice to prove the mob wrong and point out brilliant, unnoticed strengths of this remake of the campy '60s TV spy series. But it is impossible, because the movie is indeed as bad as everyone says it is. A great cast, great source material and occasional flashes of style are all defeated by a worse-than-pedestrian script and a directing technique that can only be labelled directionless.

Sean Connery is supposed to be a mad scientist who blackmails the world by wreaking havoc with the weather, but the combination of his underwritten role and larger-than-life screen persona means that he never seems like a villain. He just hauls out his usual bag of tricks -- the raised eyebrow, the Lothario routine, the genial Scotsman's humor -- and tries to have fun with the part while winking at the audience and generally staying aloof from the proceedings. Ralph Fiennes, on the other hand, takes his role of secret agent John Steed quite seriously. He tries to replace Patrick MacNee's good-natured hamminess with a subtle blend of campy whimsicality and steely intensity, and the approach might have worked, had he not been working in a vacuum. Uma Thurman, wisely, attempts little besides looking beautiful, and so embarrasses herself the least.

The absence of a fully developed -- let alone imaginative -- script means the movie often grinds to a halt, as the dull action sequences are played out with little or no relation to the surrounding scenes, which generally feature awkward attempts at witty repartee and double entendre. And though the film is supposed to be about the destruction of the world, the computer-generated images fail to disguise the fact that it was shot using just a couple of locations, a large soundstage and a small handful of mute extras.

[Mary Frances]

http://austinchronicle.com/gbase/Calendar/Film?Film=oid%3A138239

The Avengers

By Marc Savlov
Austin Chroncile
August 21, 1998

Rating: 1.5/4 stars

It's been some time since I had a chance to catch the old BBC television show upon which this updating is based. Last weekend, then, found me sprawled in my living room, caught up in waves of nostalgia for the impeccably surreal vision of British agents John Steed and Emma Peel as portrayed by Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg on the recently released VHS compilations. To a one, the old programs were as I remembered them, breathlessly chilling in a backhanded sort of way, full of dry British wit and spare Sixties pop art set design. Macnee's trusty bowler and bumbershoot and Rigg's arch good humor and sexy karate expertise hold up surprisingly well 30 years later. At least, that is, on tape. This new film version, sad to say, is a hollow shell of the original series that so charmed U.S. television audiences in the mid Sixties, lacking nearly all of the cultural resonance and utterly devoid of the sense of kicky thrills. And it's not director Chechik's fault, either. Both he and screenwriter Don MacPherson have tendered not a lovingly bastardized update as expected, but an almost note-perfect resurrection, and that, I think, is why this film version fails so desperately. It's not The Avengers that has changed, it's everything else. True to the series, Fiennes' Steed is a gentleman out of place and time, a stiff-upper-lip Brit working for the mysterious British agency known only as The Ministry, headed by Broadbent's eccentric Mother and Shaw's equally oddball Father. When the weather over the Isles goes haywire thanks to Connery's bombastic and thoroughly deranged meteorologist character, August de Wynter, Steed is paired with the leggy Thurman as Dr. Emma Peel, a weather/jujitsu/fashion expert with a penchant for clingy fabrics and leather catsuits. Together, the two are sent out to save the world, such as it is. Everything is in place here, right down to the duo's highly stylized Brit-quip dialogue and frequent spots of tea, but outside the theatre it's 1998 and Steed and Emma no longer nurture the fatal attraction they once engendered in us. This may be different in London, which is altogether as swinging these days as it was then, if not more so. Chechik offers the occasional nod to the present via some colorful casting, but it's a case of far too little too late. Still, it's a gas to see the former human pharmacopoeia and Happy Mondays frontman Shaun Ryder playing a toadying henchman to Brit cross-dressing comic Eddie Izzard's icy killer. (Ryder, by the way, gets all the best lines, which is to say none, while Izzard finishes a close second with his single utterance, a vapid “Oh, duck.”) Fiennes and Thurman, sadly, have all the chemistry of a damp croissant, and even Chechik's noble aspirations toward the bizarre (and there are many) fall resoundingly flat. And it certainly isn't helping matters that warhorse Connery appears to have been taking lessons from the specter of Vincent Price. The Avengers is out of place in our current cinema of excess; even Mrs. Peel's laudably skintight catsuit is played far too seriously. As for me, it's back to the old tapes, which unlike this new version, still seem to fit and feel just right.

[Mary Frances]

http://www.msnbc.com/m/nw/a/m/mv_a.asp#The%20Avengers

'The Avengers'

By David Ansen
Newsweek
August 24, 1998

Director Jeremiah Chechik and screenwriter Don Macpherson seem to think that all it takes to bring "The Avengers" into the '90s is computer-generated special effects. This is an elaborate production, but all the jazzy sets and explosions in the world can't disguise the story's complete lack of urgency. Do we care if John Steed and Emma Peel can stop the evil mastermind Sean Connery from his maniacal plan to control the world's weather? As Steed and Peel, Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman, cool customers both, can't transcend the wan material. How many times can you get a laugh out of the idea of a tea break? Chechik does manage to pull off a few striking visual effects: a conference room full of men disguised in colorful teddy-bear suits; a creepily surreal sequence in which Thurman can't escape from a marble room and the almost Magritte-like vision of an invisible bureaucrat, identifiable only by his glasses and his pipe (his voice is supplied by Patrick Macnee). More indicative of the film's general wrongheadedness is its misuse of the gifted stand-up comic Eddie Izzard, who plays a sinister heavy and is given a grand total of two words to say. Quite simply, the champagne has lost its fizz.(on video)

[Mary Frances]

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/review/movie/0,6115,284728~1~~,00.html

The Avengers

by Owen Gleiberman
Entertainment Weekly
September 24, 1998

Rating: D+

Did anyone really think it would work? Critically savaged, already an embarrassing failure at the box office, The Avengers is a big, spinning Wiffle ball of a movie. It's worth remembering, though, before the picture vanishes from theaters entirely, just what this project's evanescent allure was originally all about.



On television in the mid-'60s, Patrick Macnee, as John Steed, and Diana Rigg, as Emma Peel, would scoot around in a Bondian sports car, battling sci-fi crimes against the Empire. The ultimate action, though, consisted of the duo's quips, sallies, and double entendres, many of which were tossed off during fencing practice that appeared to be more than a bit S&M kinky. The verbal sparring looked back over its shoulder to screwball comedy, but what people continue to remember with such affection is the way that the posh, winking savoir faire of The Avengers tickled the cusp of the sexual revolution. Steed, with his bowler hat, umbrella, and mischievous gleam, was a parody of the sort of trusty English gent who was on the verge of looking as out of style as Queen Victoria. Peel, embodied by the incandescent Rigg, was a Carnaby Street gamine in midriff-baring catsuits -- a next-generation pixie. Though the characters remained platonic playmates, they seemed to be jousting across an erotic/cultural divide, and that was the show's real romance -- the image of arch British reserve giving way to swinging freedom.

All of which is to say that if you put Ralph Fiennes in a bowler hat and Uma Thurman in a catsuit and have them toss cute one-liners at each other, you can call the result The Avengers, but you've come about as close to capturing the eccentric, trapped-in-its-time sauciness of the TV series as you would by devoting a theme restaurant to it. The casting of Fiennes is particularly maladroit. He's an actor of rare intellectual delicacy, but I've almost never seen him crack what could truly be described as a smile. As Steed, he seems less an ironic patrician superhero than an overly sensitive boy dressed up in his rich uncle's clothes. Thurman, at least, is sultry, but she lacks Rigg's teasing suggestion of innocence. Her Emma just seems like a runway model with attitude.

I'm only pretending, of course, that any two actors could have salvaged this movie. Directed by Jeremiah Chechik, The Avengers is too enervated to qualify as even a full-scale disaster. It's like a Batman movie in which the villain forgot to show up, and Batman did too. Certainly, I can't think of another film that has so thoroughly achieved the feat of making Sean Connery boring. As the evil August De Wynter, who launches a plot to control the weather, and with it the world, Connery rants and growls with monotonous nastiness. There's a nifty scene in which Emma gets trapped in a marble stairway that folds back on itself like an M.C. Escher dreamscape. But that's the only moment in the film with genuine visual charge. The Avengers is a package of slick nothing -- pop nostalgia that can't remember what it's nostalgic for.

[Mary Frances]

http://65.201.198.5/movies/capsules/16761_AVENGERS

The Avengers

by Lisa Alspector
The Chicago Reader
(No date given)

Agent John Steed (Ralph Fiennes) presents his ad hoc partner Emma Peel (Uma Thurman) with a new pair of leggy boots, zipping them awkwardly over her wrinkled red tights without a hint of slickness or sensuality in this costume and production-design vehicle (1998). Neither elegant nor macho nor elegant-and-macho, Fiennes is terribly cast; Thurman at least provides the equivalent of a dressmaker's dummy on which to hang neo-mod fashions. Screaming for attention they don't deserve are setups such as one in a boardroom where arch villain Sean Connery reminds his cronies that the reason they're wearing giant teddy-bear suits in rainbow colors is that they can't be allowed to recognize one another--back story for the art direction. An Escherian staircase repeatedly confounds Thurman, providing an excuse for an optical illusion and overhead view in the same shot. But the grasping novelty of the visuals doesn't rival the uncharismatic leads or the hopelessly, unironically banal plot, in which the agents must foil Connery's scheme to control the weather so he can sell tolerable conditions to the populace. Jeremiah Chechik directed a screenplay by Don Macpherson inspired by the 60s TV show

[Mary Frances]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/avengershunter.htm

'Avengers': Old Gem, Tinny New Setting

By Stephen Hunter
The Washington Post
August 15, 1998


Uma Thurman and Ralph Fiennes are "The Avengers." (Warner Bros.)

The best thing in the new "Avengers" movie is the old Avenger, Patrick Macnee. You have to look quick and listen hard to catch him because he's playing an invisible man.

But the presence of his charming voice points out what else in this new "Avengers" has become invisible.

That is, charm. Macnee was such a fantastic TV figure, his eyes atwinkle, a vivid irony in his tones, his physical grace as comic as it was impressive, his chemistry with Diana Rigg's Emma Peel ablaze with oxidation, that he made that old show a total must-see. He was its engine of deftness, its liberating spirit of merriment. He was that rarity of rarities: an English gentleman who actually got it.

Did I say invisible? In this movie, the sense of charm has been obliterated. A comet must have hit it! Maybe a dinosaur stepped on it! In any event, the new "Avengers" is dismal in dispiriting, dreary ways, and Ralph Fiennes, playing Macnee's part, is a particular disaster.

He thinks he's acting! He thinks this is a character! He thinks "The Avengers" was created by John le Carre on a dark night of the soul after losing a penetration agent at the Berlin Wall! You can feel him thinking his way into the part, groping with motivation, inventing back story, working so hard, laboring so mightily that in the end, nothing is left save a dour, grim chap you wouldn't invite to a tea party, much less a $100 million movie. Ooof! When you can sense the actor trying, something is way wrong.

That old series – which first ran from 1966 to 1969 on ABC with Macnee and, for the initial two years, Rigg – was built on a tremendous conceit: an ironic union of old and new Britains, both still Great. Mrs. Peel, all legs and deadpan attitude, was the new post-Beatles England, all Carnaby and Mary Quant. She knew who Mick Jagger was, she'd gotten high with Brian Epstein, she knew John when he started the Quarrymen. Steed, on the other hand, was old Brit, in pinstripes and bowler, with a brolly and an upper lip so disciplined sweat wouldn't dare accumulate there, just as his sang-froid was so majestic that no tremor, no qualm, no hesitation, no doubt, no tic could disturb it. He was unfazeable, unflappable, imperturbable. His was simply to do and quip.

Poor Fiennes hasn't a clue. He exchanges dried double-entendres with Uma Thurman's Mrs. Peel (Uma? Emma. Emma? Uma.) as if they were olive pits. When he bolts into action, sloppy editing makes certain we know it's a heavyset stuntman doing all the nasty physical stuff. On those few scenes where the camera is too close for a double, he's seen to move with the last-kid-chosen's graceless fear of activity. A scene where he and his new Mrs. Peel exchange repartee and rapiers reminds one of just how much better it worked between Zorro and his love mate. In "The Avengers," neither blade nor wit flash.

As for Thurman, she seems a bit more relaxed than he does, but not by much, and her feeble English accent keeps veering out of control. She's used more as a model than a character and her seven-league legs get more coverage than the script. But the two of them have no sexual subtext, as did Steed and Peel. You always wondered about the originals: Did they do it? Were they both gay? Why can't she ever smile? Who zips her up in those leather cat suits? How can a man look so good in a hat as silly as a bowler? About these two you wonder: Who had the bigger trailer? Who has more points? Who'll get top billing when "Entertainment Tonight" goes behind the scenes for another of its hard-hitting investigative reports?

The film is over-elaborate in its special effects and under-elaborate in its plotting, which is haphazard to the point of laziness. It seems that Sean Connery, that blowhard's blowhard, has through some nefarious means taken command of the weather. His question might be phrased "Wither weather?" – or even "Whether weather?" – but the long and short of it is he wants lots of money or he'll send El Niño into Piccadilly. (Alert Dan Rather!)

Through a series of sloppy plot gambits, Mrs. Peel and Steed encounter him and have silly little fights. As on the original show, a spirit of exaggeration is the point. But here, blown up and inflated by several gazillion dollars, none of the big set pieces seem very much fun at all. Nothing kills charm like money, I guess. In one, mechanical dragonflies strafe the heroes as Mrs. Peel's powder-blue E-type Jag careens across the lovely English countryside. In another, Fiennes and Connery sword fight on a catwalk inside some kind of artificial monsoon. None of them has any style or rhythm.

How much easier if "The Avengers" were bad on an epic scale – kitschy, campy, corny and clumsy. But it's not. It's badness is banal, traceable to the usual sources: not enough wit, too much money, no clear tone, no confidence, nothing to say.

[Mary Frances]

http://www.mountainx.com/movies/a/avengers.php

The Avengers

By Ken Hanke
Mountain XPress (NC-US)
(No date given)

Rating: 4 stars

Having finally been forced to watch Jeremiah Chechik's much detested big screen version of the classic '60s British TV series, I have to confess that I thought it was a lot of well-intended fun. That sentence will get me branded a traitor by Avengers fans – and, yes, I'm a major fan of the show. You simply do not go through puberty watching Diana Rigg in Carnaby Street cat suits and leather and escape without a lasting impression. And, yes, I have all the episodes.

But really, what is all the fuss about? That Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman aren't Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg? Of course, they aren't, but then they don't really try to be – presumably they knew that was a hopeless task. I've read a lot of blather about how "silly" the plot is. Excuse me? We are talking about a film based on the TV series that boasted gadgets that could shrink things to tiny toys, and inventions like "broadcast power" and robotic creatures called "cybernauts" (they were so well liked, they made three appearances), aren't we? In fact, there's a tenuous connection between the plot of the movie – involving controlling the weather – and one of the sainted Rigg episodes, A Surfeit of H2O.

There are, I fear, some fans out there in serious need of lightening up and getting some perspective. The show was never meant to be deep or complex or meaningful (we had The Prisoner for that). It was in the style of its time – the British Invasion style. It was cheeky, stylish fun with neat Brit cars, witty repartee, bad jokes, quirky characters and outrageous villains. And the movie? Well, Mrs. Peel may have lost her Lotus Elan, but she does have an E type Jag, and Steed has his Bentley. And the rest of it at least duplicates the surface. If anything, the movie's a bit too slick – too elaborate for a show that thrived on making-do. But I don't doubt that the show would have welcomed this budget! Give the movie a chance. It's stylish and enjoyable – and it does give Patrick Macnee a nice cameo "appearance." Rated PG-13 for brief strong language.