The Avengers

Ralph Fiennes, excellent actor though he may be, is no Patrick Macnee when it comes to a bowler hat -- he looks like a baffled ferret. But that's the least of The Avengers' problems. The TV series charmed with its blithely Magritte-like look, Chesterton-lite capers, ironic banter, and a pair of heroes sprung fully formed from the forehead of '60s British cool. Not only does the movie squander all that, it wastes one of the more impressive casts of the summer.

Fiennes is John Steed, an upper-crust bowlered 'n' brollied secret agent for the Ministry. Already the film is in trouble, as, unlike the original, it feels compelled to explain the self-evident. The Ministry has a Father (Richard Broadbent, in a wheelchair) and a Mother (Fiona Shaw sans wheelchair, but looking more like Peter Sellers's Dr. Strangelove). And Steed's partner, the mysterious Mrs. Emma Peel (Uma Thurman in the part made famous by Diana Rigg), is now a mundane metereologist with a snazzy wardrobe and no gift for repartee.

Not that anything would help the film's f/x-addled excuse for a plot. We get occasional glimpses of August De Wynter (Sean Connery, content to collect a check and watch his stunt double battle Fiennes's stunt double), a deranged scientist blackmailing the world by controlling the weather, and the standard shots of landmarks leveled by lightning bolts and tornadoes. And then there is Peel's clone double, unaccounted for and inconsequential. Hapless director Jeremiah Chechik's gratuitous flashes of the surreal (bad guys disguised as teddy bears, De Wynter's Marienbad-like manor) merely underscore the film's cluelessness. Far from improving on the original, The Avengers makes a travesty of it.

-- Peter Keough