4.2 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 2.0 | |
Overall | 2.0 |
Dapper John Steed and cat-suited Emma Peel are secret agents who fight world threats with style. Their latest enemy is Sir August De Wynter, an evil genius who has learned to control the weather and threatens the world with raging ice storms, scorching temperatures and mechanical buzz-bombing bees.
Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Uma Thurman, Sean Connery, Patrick Macnee, Jim BroadbentComedy | 100% |
Action | 35% |
Adventure | 34% |
Sci-Fi | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
French: Dolby Digital 5.1 (640 kbps)
German: Dolby Digital 5.1 (640 kbps)
Italian: Dolby Digital 5.1 (640 kbps)
Spanish: Dolby Digital 5.1 (640 kbps)
Spanish: Dolby Digital 2.0
Portuguese: Dolby Digital 2.0
Japanese: Dolby Digital 5.1
Japanese is hidden
English SDH, French, German SDH, Italian SDH, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 0.5 | |
Video | 3.5 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 0.5 | |
Overall | 2.0 |
The big screen adaptation of the Sixties British TV series about a dapper spy and his karate-chopping female partner was originally scheduled for a June 1998 opening as a summer tentpole. But when executives at Warner saw director Jeremiah S. Chechik's initial cut, they hated it. After a disastrous test screening, reshoots were ordered, major chunks of plot were eliminated, and the release date was booted to August, with no advance screenings for critics. The film that Warner ultimately released—reduced from nearly two hours to 89 minutes—was reviled by critics and shunned by audiences, and Chechik's once-promising career as a Hollywood film director screeched to a halt. He retreated to television and didn't make another feature until the 2013 independent release, The Right Kind of Wrong. Over the years, a small but vocal fan base has repeatedly sought the release of Chechik's original cut, which the director has offered to re-assemble at no charge, but Warner has shown zero interest in revisiting The Avengers other than recouping its losses on video. Because the original shooting script provided the basis for a novelization, the story as Chechik intended it is generally known, and the perception persists that The Avengers could have been much better, if only the executives had left well enough alone. Watching the film on Warner's new Blu-ray release (my first viewing in sixteen years), I kept looking for signs of the superior work amid the incoherent mush that, according to legend, resulted strictly from studio interference. It wasn't there. No amount of additional or alternate material could have saved The Avengers, which was ill-conceived from the start, then miscast and wrongly directed. Everything that won the TV series its fans and acclaim had evaporated from the material long before the studio intervened (if it was ever there to begin with). Warner's only mistake was throwing good money after bad, because the reshoots and re-editing improved the film in only one respect: a shorter running time. The pain ends sooner.
The Avengers was shot by Roger Pratt, the distinguished British cinematographer who created the darkly surreal Gotham City of Tim Burton's Batman and the waking dream of The Fisher King for Terry Gilliam, as well as two installments of the Harry Potter series. No stranger to either fantasy or whimsy, Pratt was an ideal choice for The Avengers, if the script had been worthy of his talents. Having first released The Avengers on DVD in 1998, it seems unlikely that Warner had an HD transfer already on the shelf, and yet the image on its 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray doesn't look particularly new, fresh or impressive. It's probably too much to hope that Warner would invest significant time or effort in bringing an unloved project like The Avengers to Blu-ray, but then again why bother if you're not going to make the effort? Detail is quite good, blacks are solid, and the film's unnatural color palette (most obviously expressed in the teddy bear costumes) is accurately rendered. The many scenes where mist, fog or diffusion soften the image have been reproduced with surprisingly good clarity. However, the image lacks any sense of depth, even in scenes that are brightly lit and starkly spare in their design (e.g., the croquet match or some of the Ministry scenes that are obviously based on The Prisoner, which, in turn, borrowed a lot from The Avengers). Many of the big effects scenes are affirmatively murky, and while some of this might be attributable to less-than-perfect compositing, CG had long since progressed past the point where that excuse was readily available. The transfer simply isn't up to par. With no obvious signs of noise reduction or digital filtering (and clearly no artificial sharpening), the most likely culprit is an inadequate scan, possibly at 2K resolution to save costs. With no extras other than a trailer, Warner has achieved an average bitrate of 23.40 on a BD-25, which is better than the studio has provided for much superior films. There is much to fault in The Avengers, but compression errors aren't on the list.
The Avengers has an appropriately boisterous 5.1 soundtrack, presented on Blu-ray in lossless DTS-HD MA, which becomes especially active whenever August De Winter interferes with the weather, then goes all out during the final battle in De Winter's lair. Other scenes of note on the soundtrack involve a pursuit on ground and rooftop after a meeting of De Winter's BROLLY organization, a hot air balloon trip over London, and a tour of a unique enterprise called Wonderland Weather. The film's dialogue is clear enough, although it doesn't add up to anything coherent, thanks to studio meddling. The score is by Joel McNeely (A Million Ways to Die in the West), who had to do a rush job because Michael Kamen, after scoring the film, was either unavailable or unwilling (depending on who is telling the story) to rescore the studio-mandated recut.
The only extra is the film's trailer (480i; 1.33:1; 2:25). Warner's DVD contained additional trailers for Batman & Robin, Dangerous Liaisons, The Man Who Would Be King, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation and U.S. Marshalls.
I am sure The Avengers has its fans, and they will acquire this disc regardless of a reviewer's opinion. For anyone else, the film has a certain train-wreck fascination, but even that wears off quickly. Save your money.
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