151 Proof Movies Hangover: The Avengers

This week we checked out the 1998 The Avengers movie in honor of the 2012 version of the film. While this film had no chance of living up to the benchmark set by the Marvel version, we were at least hoping for an entertaining movie. What we got… left us a bit cold.

Let’s go to the score board!

Movie- 1.5

Swan- 2

Having done no research on this, everything I say now will just be me guessing, but I have a habit of guessing correctly. This movie is a Hollywood attempt at a British dry comedy, to the extent that the humor is based around the fact that they have English accents. The amount of times they had tea during an action scene or directly following one was staggeringly high. As for the plot of this movie, I am not really sure. Voldemort is a our pseudo-James Bond, Poison Ivy is a scientist or something and Sean Connery is basically a James Bond villain mixed with weather wizard. I think Sean Connery’s goal in this was to make a storm so that he could hold England for ransom or something. I am not really sure, the movie is fairly dull so it was hard to pay attention.

The only saving grace of this movie was Sean Connery himself, finally getting to play a villain and boy, he really has fun with the role. I wouldn’t say his acting is good but it is entertaining and very over the top. Everything else was bland bland bland.

Should you watch this? No

Penguin- 1

British humor can be dry, I get that. And when done well it works flawlessly. When done like it was in this movie, it leaves your characters feeling stiff and lifeless. When you can’t attach to your main characters (a problem, I also shared with the Twilight film), its hard for me as a viewer to be invested on any level of the film. I have no interest in what happens to them. And I’m pretty sure their lives were in danger throughout the course of the movie, but I couldn’t give you exact details. 

On the flip side, Sean Connery seemed to have a ball getting to play an over the top villain. I can only imagine after doing so many Bond films that he wanted to see a movie from the other side. I mean there is literally a scene where he explains his evil master plan while wearing a colorful teddy bear costume.. and so is everyone else! It was an amazingly awesome visual, and perhaps the highlight of the movie for me. Which says a lot about the film.

As for the plot, I’ll be honest.. I just know they make a ton of weather related puns. That’s all!

Drinking-2.5

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For having a rule where we drank every time we saw weather or elements we surprisingly didn’t drink that much. Don’t get me wrong, we drank, and got kind of drunk but I would not rank this as one of our worst. It does hold the record for soonest drink, clocking in at under a minute. We got some fair use out of the characters saying the other characters names, and the weather but some of them, such as the hair touching or hat touching were hardly used. I think upon seeing it we could come up with some better rules for it, which we shall do when we rewatch this opening weekend of The Avengers 2!

Penguin- 2

We mentioned during the rules that we were flying blind on this film. It happens, we can’t watch every movie before we do these. So the rules were kind of a mixed bag. First, the puns were hard to judge just because.. the delivery in every line was so dry and humorless I’m sure we just missed them. Second, the hat and hair rule didn’t really come into effect as much as we expected/hoped for. They made such a show of it in the trailer. Alas.

On the other hand, we got some mileage out of the name rule since Steed always seemed to refer to Uma Thurman’s character by name… which oddly enough I can’t remember for the life of me. We should have included a rule for every time they said MOTHER in the film. That would have helped a bit.

The element rules was a mixed bag, as it seemed to be a bigger deal during the opening and ending of the film, and not so much during the actual film.

Anyhow, its not really worth investing your time into the movie for drinks or for entertainment.

If you see one Avengers film this year, do me a favor and make sure that it isn’t this one!