It comes to something when the most interesting thing about a film is spotting all the famlliar locations in the south of England, but that's what I ended up doing here!
Being a massive fan of The Avengers TV series, I managed to resist watching this film for 20 years. In the end, morbid curiosity took over - just how bad could it be?
The main problem here seems to be that the whole film is completely ill-judged. It's like a hotchpotch of lukewarm & half-baked ideas from the 60s TV series - thrown into a melting pot with no real love or appreciation of what made the TV series so special.
Ralph Fiennes is miscast as a foppish & smarmy Steed, and never feels like a respected and likeable gentleman from 'the ministry'. Uma Thurman fares slightly better, but there's never any real chemistry between them, and it just makes you long to see the original instead.
Why do they drink tea all the time? I don't remember that happening in the real Avengers! Predictable views of tourist London only serve to add to the feeling that someone thinks this will all make it more 'English' & please a section of the American audience who think England is still like how it was 50 years ago.
Sean Connery does a good job as the villain bent on controlling the weather with his elaborate machine (nods to the episode 'A Surfeit of H2O' here), but the whole Bond-like epic climax falls flat, & goes down the drain faster than rain in a rainstorm.
This whole ludicrous film feels contrived, unreal, charmless and cartoonish. Its only purpose seems to annoy & confound long-standing Avengers fans, and to bore contemporary cinema watchers who now probably wonder what all the fuss was about.
Ralph Fiennes is miscast as a foppish & smarmy Steed, and never feels like a respected and likeable gentleman from 'the ministry'. Uma Thurman fares slightly better, but there's never any real chemistry between them, and it just makes you long to see the original instead.
Why do they drink tea all the time? I don't remember that happening in the real Avengers! Predictable views of tourist London only serve to add to the feeling that someone thinks this will all make it more 'English' & please a section of the American audience who think England is still like how it was 50 years ago.
Sean Connery does a good job as the villain bent on controlling the weather with his elaborate machine (nods to the episode 'A Surfeit of H2O' here), but the whole Bond-like epic climax falls flat, & goes down the drain faster than rain in a rainstorm.
This whole ludicrous film feels contrived, unreal, charmless and cartoonish. Its only purpose seems to annoy & confound long-standing Avengers fans, and to bore contemporary cinema watchers who now probably wonder what all the fuss was about.