Rating summary

Movie		0.5
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		2.0

The Avengers Blu-ray Movie Review

"Extraordinary Crimes Against the People, and the State, Have to Be Avenged by Agents Extraordinary"—But Not These Two

Reviewed by Michael Reuben August 10, 2014

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 TV series ran from 1961 through 1969 in the U.K., and it went through several versions and cast changes before settling into the pairing of John Steed and Emma Peel, played by Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg, for which the series is best known. This distinctive team of crime fighters/superspies was an immediate hit with American audiences when ABC commenced broadcasting their episodes in 1966, not so much because of their acumen, but because of their sophisticated adult relationship. Steed was a confirmed bachelor with impeccable manners but a constant twinkle in his eyes. Mrs. Peel was a married woman whose husband was conveniently out of the picture. They worked together, played together, flirted shamelessly, and no one was ever sure what happened offscreen. However ridiculous the plots became on The Avengers—and the show was essentially a spoof of other movies and TV shows—viewers could always rely on Steed and Mrs. Peel to give them something solid and relatable.

The film script by Don MacPherson (Absolute Beginners) undertakes the task of having Steed and Mrs. Peel meet for the first time and fall instantly into the kind of relationship that they have already established on the TV show when we first encounter them. It's tempting to say that Ralph Fiennes as Steed and Uma Thurman as Mrs. Peel lack "chemistry", and it's certainly true that they play the parts oddly. Fiennes's Steed has all of Macnee's formal manners but none of his warmth or charm. Thurman's Mrs. Peel is so clearly an American doing a British accent that she isn't for a moment convincing as a capable Englishwoman under whose cooly professional surface beats a passionate heart that will open only to the man who meets her exacting standards.

But even if the casting had been perfect, it couldn't overcome the script, which takes the small-scale world of a quirky TV show and inflates it to gargantuan, James Bond-scale proportions. As Thurman and Fiennes run around massive sets full of absurd and sometimes just bonkers detail, they trade quips at a breakneck pace in an effort to compete with the scenery. Even Macnee and Rigg would have had trouble making their feelings register through the sensory barrage.

In an equally ill-considered choice, MacPherson's script has the bad guy, August De Winter (Sean Connery), using a duplicate Mrs. Peel to do his dirty work, thereby arousing suspicion in Steed about his new partner and clouding their relationship. In the original script, the evil double was a robot; in the Warner-mandated reshoot, she became a clone, but the difference hardly matters. A duplicitous double is the kind of device that works in a long-running series where the character being impersonated is familiar and beloved, so that the double's bad behavior comes as a surprise. Introducing an evil twin in what amounts to an origin story is the act of a storyteller who has lost all interest in the characters themselves.

August De Winter's plot to control the weather certainly is the type of crackpot scheme that the original Avengers might have featured, and his organization, BROLLY (or "British Royal Organization for Lasting Liquid Years"), has the kind of gimmicky name and logo that Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg might have pursued ("brolly" is English slang for an umbrella). But then it turns out that Mrs. Peel is also "Dr." Peel, an eminent climate scientist who worked for the government on the Prospero project, which is supposed to be some sort of "weather shield" that De Winter has now subverted to his own ends. (Much of this is better explained by the deleted material.) De Winter also has some sort of erotic fixation with Mrs. Peel, which may explain why he created her double. Either way, Mrs. Peel is no longer John Steed's reliable partner, but some sort of pawn in an elaborate game being played between the two competing heads of the intelligence service, Mother and Father (Jim Broadbent and Fiona Shaw, both of whom do what they can with cartoon parts that no longer make sense, if they ever did).

In the end, The Avengers can't think of anything to do except make a running joke out of having tea (which is about as deep as these filmmakers' understanding of British culture goes), then blowing up the villain's lair, after a suitable fight between Steed and De Winter and between Mrs. Peel and De Winter's chief henchman, Bailey (Eddie Izzard, who speaks only one line and who took the part solely for a chance to meet Sean Connery). One is tempted to call The Avengers "generic", except that it's not. It's uniquely bad in a frustrating way that occurs only when a lot of talent, effort and money have been wasted because nobody was willing to step back and say, "Wait a minute! None of this makes sense!"

The Avengers Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

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 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

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 Avengers Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

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.

The Avengers Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

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.