The Avengers
The Avengers (1998) Rewatch: ✅
I could only really recall two things about The Avengers, neither of which were especially useful heading into a rewatch. First, I’d filed it mentally alongside Lost In Space as “a film I paid money to watch” and secondly, somebody at head office had bought in way too many copies for the video shop and it was a fucking ‘mare to shift.
Absolutely useless brain.
Not that I think remembering anything would have made much difference considering nothing in the thing really makes a jot of sense. However, I am older, not especially wiser, but certainly a lot less fidgety over films so I figured hey, let’s see how this goes. Over the years it’s gotten quite a reputation as being one of the worst films, so do I still feel the same way about it in 2025?
Unsurprisingly, not really. I can see why nineties me walked out the cinema entirely nonplussed, half the film is so obviously missing and as a blockbuster take on The Avengers it hasn’t got the psychedelic weirdness or the cast to do it justice. I’m not the biggest fan of any of the previous incarnations of The Avengers (though I have an obvious soft spot for its place in the UK TV pantheon), so it’s not like I’m especially precious over it, it’s just very clearly not playing in the same league.
But I still found plenty to enjoy in it this time round. Sean Connery as a killer teddy bear that controls the weather, a killer bee drone chase featuring Shaun Ryder is short, has some atrociously composited effects, but does the job a killer bee drone chase featuring Shaun Ryder should. There’s plenty of inane gadgetry and something about clones but that seems to have mainly got lost in the edit somewhere.
It’s a film best described as a series of things happening one after the other and sometimes the thing seems related to the scene that’s gone before but I wouldn’t bet on it and just for that, there’s a certain joy to it. As it goes on, it somehow gets more incoherent and the entire film unravelling before your eyes is pretty funny with some distance.
Sure, there’s no tension, nothing dramatic manages to really be dramatic and again, again, again, huge chunks of it have disappeared somewhere down a plug hole leaving it all making very little sense at all but no, it’s nowhere near terrible. Not great? Absolutely. Tatwatch fodder? Absolutely-abso-absolutely.
Fuck it, it’s worth it for Sean Connery chewing the scenery alone! Him and Fiona Shaw are the only members of the cast who get anything to ham up and both make the most of it, as is right and just. Just, yeah, don’t expect to follow what’s going on because that’s literally impossible. Blink and something else is happening.
Reckon I’ll add it into my ‘crap films that’d pass a Sunday afternoon’ pile. That seems about the right place for it. And yeah, I’ll watch it again sometime.