The Avengers 

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Director: Jeremiah S. Chechik
Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Uma Thurman, Sean Connery, Eddie Izzard, Eileen Atkins

There are all kinds of axioms in Hollywood about "failing upwards." In a sense, all P.R. is good P.R., even if it twinges on the negative. If you make a stinker of a movie, you'll survive through public exposure; I mean, Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman are still doing fine even 10 years past "Ishtar."

But then there's the other sort of failure, an irradicable cancer that grows on some people's careers, the sort of unspeakable mistake that bleeds and hemorrhages into the very fibers of their vocation. I think "The Avengers" may well qualify as one movie that Uma Thurman, Ralph Fiennes and Sean Connery will need Janovian Primal Scream Therapy to forget. This movie isn't just bad, folks, it's a celluloid barbiturate, guaranteed to take whatever mood you were in, and bring it down about fourteen notches.

You still want the plot? So do I. Fiennes is John Steed, the effortlessly stylish British spy in a bowler hat, and Uma Thurman is Emma Peel, the brilliant doctor with a Ph.D. in the weather. Together they must foil Sean Connery, who has developed a machine that can control the clouds and is holding the weather hostage. That's about all I could glean from the script, although there are some other bad guys and red herrings to make everything into a confusingly fetid bouillabaisse.

Edits are unbearable; people jump in one shot, and don't land in the other—it's a continuity nitpicker's dream. The script is undecipherable; mentions are made of cloning, of hot air balloons, of teatime, but the thing holds together like rope made of Jell-o. And the acting, god, the acting; Uma Thurman is The Big Lie, folks, and Ralph Fiennes has undone much of his previous beauty in both "Schindler's List" and even the transcendent Oscar and Lucinda. And forget about Sean Connery's slobbering and galumphing through this thing; I just hope the check from Warner Bros. cleared. Like all truly bad experiences, the movie reminds you every half hour of what it could have been. The opening titles are as cool as anything out right now, a swirl of weather-related imagery set against the morphing silhouettes of Steed and Peel, while a trance techno vibrates throughout. There's even a scene reminiscent of an M.C. Escher painting, a staircase that goes both down AND up, a truly neat visual experience until director Jeremiah Chechik ruins it by being profanely illogical. This is the kind of movie that makes my job—usually a delight that I am lucky to have—into a dreary, depressing chore. After an experience with "The Avengers," you won't want to see movies for a while; charring to the celluloid-lover's heart, it'll turn you off the multiplex for at least a week, like a case of alcohol poisoning or a nightmarishly bad burrito. Do yourself a favor. See anything else!

—Ian Williams

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