August 13–20, 1998

movies

The Avengers

Rumors were rampant when The Avengers was unavailable for previews. And when Warner Brothers excused this move with a concern that reviewers would compare the movie unfairly with the TV series, all the while emphasizing the series-movie connection at almost every point in the advertising campaign, fears that the film sucked seemed all but confirmed. In fact, the movie does suck. Worse, it sucks in banal and at-one-time fixable ways. The characters are talking past each other, the sexual chemistry that's supposed to exist between old-schooler Steed (Ralph Fiennes) and new kid Mrs. Peel (Uma Thurman) is nowhere in sight, and scene to scene, the plot is unfathomable, like the scenes were split apart and tossed together without what might have been gap-bridging explanations (like, where and how did they get those beachball-like gizmos they use to walk across water? and what's up with the maze and the telephone booth? how does Alice get back to HQ?). Sure, the series was a glorious abstraction, the lives of the characters had little to do with reality as any of us know it. But here the incomprehensibility seems a matter of sloppiness and arrogance, rather than calculation.

—Cindy Fuchs