The Avengers is a 1998 American satirical spy action comedy film directed by Jeremiah Chechik, an adaptation of the 1961–1969 British television series of the same name.

It stars Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman as secret agents John Steed and Emma Peel, and Sean Connery as Sir August de Wynter, a mad scientist bent on controlling the world's weather.

Steed and Emma follow a lead to Wonderland Weather, a business that artificially creates heat or rain with a special machine, where they discover two dead men in teddy bear suits.

When de Wynter is later distracted, Emma tries to escape but feels faint and finds herself trapped due to the mansion's ever-changing floor plan.

However, Emma is arrested by Father, while Steed visits Invisible Jones, a man inside The Ministry, to investigate the meaning of a map found at Wonderland Weather.

[4] Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote: There's...some business involving a dead ringer for Emma going around causing trouble, and there's some mention of the word "cloning".

[6]Due to internal wrangling at Warner Bros., the decision was made to vastly cut down the running time after test screenings, reducing the 115-minute film to 89 minutes, sacrificing much coherence and continuity in the process.

Key scenes removed included the opening sequence in which Mrs. Peel's evil clone infiltrates and destroys the Prospero science installation; early trailers included the scene where she says the words "How now brown cow" in a false telephone box to gain admittance; these words are later used in the film when Steed and Peel use them to enter de Wynter's island fortress in another telephone box.

The rock band Radiohead recorded a version of their song "Man of War" for the Avengers soundtrack but abandoned it after a failed studio session.

The site's critical consensus reads: "A TV spinoff that lacks enough energy to spin, The Avengers is an ineptly written, woefully miscast disaster.

[12] Fans disliked the film for its disrespect to the series (particularly the introduction of a romance between Steed and Peel — previously a carefully ambiguous subject).

[13] Rod Dreher in the New York Post called the film "a big fat gob of maximum crapulosity, the kind of shallow, stupid, big-budget cow pile that smells of Joel Schumacher", referring to the previous summer's likewise poorly received Batman & Robin, also starring Thurman.

David Bianculli stated: "This Avengers film is so horrendously, painfully, and thoroughly awful that it gives other cinematic clunkers like Ishtar and Howard the Duck a good name.

Terrible special effects and zero chemistry between Fiennes and Thurman make this notorious disaster a total waste of everyone's time and energy".

[16] Several critics noted that despite the film being written by Englishman Don Macpherson, the American production team fatally misunderstood the symbols of "Britishness" central to The Avengers series, such as the inclusion of an inexplicable gadget on the dashboard of Steed's Bentley, which appeared to dispense tea, with milk already added.