Cast your mind back to the balmy summer of 1998 – a summer that spawned untold horrors upon cinema audiences in the form of the sugar-coated but strychnine laced Prince of Egypt, the cheesy and cringe-worthy Armageddon and the putrid Sony version of Godzilla all of which stank up theatres worldwide making it a summer to remember for all the wrong reasons. It was actually even worse because in the maelstrom of garbage that was flying around Warner Brother’s fired its own big budget summer salvo in the form of a flashy update cum remake of the 60’s TV secret agent show The Avengers.

Expectations had been fuelled by the casting of Uma Thurman who (then) was white hot property in the days following Pulp Fiction and she had been the only one to have come out relatively unscathed from the previous summers debacle Batman and Robin. This time she was to be cast as super sleuth secret agent Emma Peel while the part of the dashing, debonair and rather spruce John Steed was awarded to another potential “A” leaguer Ralph Fiennes. Jeremiah Chechik was signed on to direct this big budget, special effects heavy film, a considerable responsibility for someone with a track record of the dire remade Sharon Stone version of Diaboliques and little else. None the less, Jerry Weintraub, a man of considerable clout at WB back in ’98 had been a huge fan of the TV show and was backing it to the hilt.

Just to shed a little light about what this film is about, one need just glance at the back of the DVD which reads: “The Avengers, the hip secret-agent series from 60’s TV, is reinvented for the movies with a stylish blend of wit, fabulous retro fashions and effects-packed action. Ralph Fiennes is the very dapper John Steed and Uma Thurman is the smartly catsuited Emma Peel, two secret agents who fight crime with style. Sean Connery portrays Sir August De Wynter, an evil genius out to control the world with his high-tech weather machine. This madman poses quite a threat to mankind with his raging ice-storms, scorching temperatures and mechanical buzz-bombing bees. But come cold, heat of dreaded plight, our two heroes never lose their cool. Tea anyone?”

This synopsis sums up the film quite perfectly, but what it turned out as was a totally misguided and unintended farce that falls so resoundingly flat on its face that it is difficult to recall a more miserable, big budget cock-up in many a year as this. The movie starts to reek of something rotten right from the very first thirty seconds when a smug and equally idiotic looking Fiennes marches out with brolly and top hat in the typical English countryside on a fresh morning only to be suddenly attacked on his way by a number of seemingly innocent passers-by such as the milkman and a group of nuns and old lady with a pram. It’s a miserably unfunny start and supposed to come as an amusing surprise that these attackers turn out to be his fellow workers who are only doing their bit to train Steed for perfection a la James Bond - how funny, one could almost die laughing!

Jim Broadbent, depicted as a macaroon gobbling duffer does his bit as a crumpled version of M from the Bond films sitting as the head of the secret “Minsitry” which has a crisis on its hands as the abovementioned mad scientist Sean Connery is huffing and puffing and threatening to literally blow the house down with his diabolical weather making gadgets. "You will now buy your weather from me!" he booms to a large gathering of world leaders all wearing teddy bear suits and nodding like that ghastly Bungle from Rainbow.

Steed and Peel are summoned by Mother (Broadbent) and Father (Fiona Shaw) – it is supposed to be terribly funny the irony that Father is infact a very butch woman while Mother a man who is an emasculated ninny…ha, bloody ha ha! – anyway, the two super agents set off to stop the dastardly Sir August De Wynter (oh, the staggering wit of the scriptwriter Don MacPherson is almost overwhelming!) from holding the world hostage with his diabolical weather controlling devices and wizardry. However they have numerous enormously dangerous hurdles to conquer among which are a frumpy double of Ms. Peel who delivers a mean karate chop, a posse of evil men in furry life sized teddy bear suits (seriously!) to be very wary of, the massive forces of the all powerful De Wynter consisting of his butler and one henchman, the miserable weather caused by De Wynter (clever name hunh….get the joke?) and some rather nifty looking helicopters which are supposed to be the Buzz-bombing bees. All this dressed up in some spiffing fashions from Carnaby Street’s finest and a script that was written by some moron who probably thinks the funniest films ever are the Austin Powers films.

This film suffers from so many problems that it would take far too long to list them. But among the most prominent and painful is the horrendous acting by the entire cast especially Ms. Thurman whose appalling accent cannot even be redeemed by her admittedly bewitching cat-suits. Ralph Fiennes and the rest of the cast are equally painful and clearly it was impossible for any one to rise above what is the worst script to have ever been converted into a big budget motion picture. The glib, humorous banter that the writers must have felt would have American audiences rolling around the isles cackling in laughter is about as funny as a trip to the dentist’s chair. Every attempted joke falls horribly flat and those typically corny one liners designed to poking fun at what the American’s consider “hysterically amusing quirky English behaviour” is a total embarrassment. The writers are particularly amused with the British obsession with tea drinking and so the movie has this running joke about tea and how even in the most extreme situations the British are absolutely must have their cuppa.

The other big joke is the British obsession with the weather….so we have constant clever, witty exchanges between Emma and Steed revolving around tea and the weather. It’s pointless to go on about the awfulness of this film and those who have written that it has no redeeming features, well, other than the cat-suits, they are absolutely spot-on. Even Sean Connery who has turned in his fair share of dreadfully mechanical performances over a long and glittering career has never appeared more automated and disinterested in a film as he appears in this particular one. Clearly it was a case of turning up for work and collecting the pay-check and nothing more.

Poor Uma Thurman fell so badly from grace after this disaster that her career hasn’t really recovered from it five years on and Ralph Fiennes has similarly never quite been the same man after this humbling experience - but lets face it, hers is an astonishingly dreadful performance. The best thing about the film is that it suffered such a miserable fate at the box office vanishing within days and most people have even forgotten that it ever existed. If anything this film should be a lesson to major studio’s who have bosses green lighting utterly misguided projects such as these without any system to ensure that such misguided crap doesn’t actually reach the production stage at all.

Also, the film smacks of being put together by some like minded idiots who find the idea of British people drinking tea with milk to be something hysterically funny or the fact that they call a pretty girl a bird or the elevator a lift……..the same type of infantile humour that pervades the infantile Austin Powers films – this almost offensive, totally outdated and very American/Japanese tourist oriented view of “British Life”. At least the Austin Powers films did have some wit and style and humour buried amidst the heaps of puerile antics but this film fails in every regard.

Finally the producers of this hunk of shite were so carried away with recreating the 60’s chic-look for their two stars and concentrating so much on how Ms. Thurman’s bum would appear on screen and the exact shape of Fiennes top hat that it didn’t phase them at all that they were shaping a huge turd that would be remembered if at all for all the wrong reasons. The film currently resides firmly anchored somewhere near the bottom of IMDB’s readers worst ever movies list and that it has a rating of even 3.4 out of 10 is testament to the generosity of their readers. This movie is so painfully awful and dull that it can’t even aspire to an afterlife on or near the “cult” shelves of a video store at some stage in the future.

Cursed with a perverse personality one had actually been seeking this film out at the local pirates in the hope that one had misunderstood its charms and qualities the first time around in the cinema (when one had to flee in a state of shock and disbelief). No such luck - Never has one checked the “remaining time” on the DVD player more than while enduring this film………the end couldn’t come soon enough despite the fairly short running time of 91 minutes (8 of which must be credits).

All said and done the film does have its uses – specifically as an instrument of torture and an effective way of getting rid of unwanted company. Jerry Weintraub and those who were responsible for this excrement really do have a lot of explaining to do and should be made to watch the film every single day for the rest of his life as penance - the complete version as apparently this theatrical version was shorn of about an hour in a desperate eleventh hour attempt at surgical wizardry. Tea anyone?