Everyone involved here has seen better days, including Director Jeremiah Chechik. His last big-screen feature, Diabolique, was a suspenseful and engaging mystery thriller. Here, his work approaches comic book territory in an ignorant fashion similar to that of the last two Batman features. The characters are larger than life - in a bad sense - and are never quite on the audience's level. All three principals are played by A-list names, but each of the three have seen better days. Connery's work here is uncharacteristically drab, and not since 1996's The Rock has he been much fun. Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman, too, are fine for the roles apart but fail to start much in the way of romantic chemistry together.

      If anything, the movie is fun to watch for several reasons, although you may have trouble convincing a friend to see the movie with you. Even though Connery is rather drab, it's been over two years since the infamous Brit has been on the scene; any dialogue he speaks is invariably fun to listen to. Also, the movie's one bit of vulgar language comes both from an unlikely character and at a horribly unlikely moment; it's over and done so fast that you might not believe your ears. Finally, in typical comic book fashion, the bad guys are surly, hulking fellows with third-grade vocabularies or women in tight catsuits. Both elicit attention from the audience, for varying reasons and lengths of time.

      But any ground made there is lost in the terribly convoluted and laborious plot that The Avengers sports. John Steed (Fiennes) and Emma Peel (Thurman) are suave and debonaire secret agents, charged with finding the cause in a recent sabotage of a British defense mechanism called Prospero. Prospero, it seems, has the ability to create a weather "shield" around the British Isles should the Union Jack come under siege. In the wrong hands (August de Wynter, played by Connery), though, the controllable weather turns into an extortion plan. De Wynter will bombard the isles with typhoons and lightning unless paid an appropriate sum. Several questions are left completely or partially unanswered throughout the movie, including an Emma Peel clone. Overall, The Avengers is too goofy to be much fun; and with luck its box office returns will be nil, sparing us of a sequel.

Craig Roush, 1998