Does Uma stack up to the Peel mystique?

"Mrs. Peel, we\'re needed."Thus would begin many an adventure for "The Avengers," the peculiar British series which, from 1961 to 1969, offered week after week the spectacle of stylish special agent John Steed as he and his partner did battle against all manner of quirky villains. The show has long enjoyed a robust cult status, its following less drastic than "Star Trek" and less nerdy than "Dr. Who," and it\'s threatening to explode again onto the mainstream pop landscape with Friday\'s release of the new big-screen remake featuring Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman. With his bowler hat and umbrella, Steed, as played by Patrick Macnee, was a distinctive and urbane anchor for the series. But it was his partner, Emma Peel, who — even though she was on the show only from 1965 to 1967 — stirred the imaginations and libidos of adolescent boys everywhere and became the show\'s most enduring icon. Improbably fetching in Marilyn Quayle hair and a tight leather catsuit, dividing her time between flipping thugs across the room and publishing papers on anthropology and thermodynamics, Emma Peel was a kind of proto-Scully, an ur-Xena.It didn\'t hurt that she was played by Diana Rigg, who not only filled out her leather ensemble quite appropriately (notwithstanding one critic\'s anxiety over her "boyish hips"), but brought to the role a set of acting chops that have also served her well in stage and screen versions of King Lear, Medea, Moll Flanders, and Rebecca. She\'s also probably most familiar to my generation as the respectable introducer of PBS\'s staid Mystery series. But to the guys who grew up watching Mrs. Peel\'s judo moves, she\'s an icon of brainy sex appeal. No surprise, given that the show\'s publicist derived the name Emma Peel from an abbreviation of the character\'s original intent: Male Appeal. M Appeal, get it? "\'The Avengers\' gave me a saucy image, all black leather and erotic," Rigg has been quoted as saying. "But I was utterly confused by it. How do you write back to someone who says in really lubricious terms that they love you in black leather? I gave my fan mail to my mother, who was wonderfully down-to-earth and Yorkshire. She wrote them back and told them, \'Those aren\'t very nice thoughts, and besides, my daughter is far too old for you. I think you need a good run around the block.\'"Hard to imagine, though, that Rigg would have expected anything less, given the outfits she was regularly shoehorned into, ranging from S&M gear to tartan catsuits to skirts criticized by the London Sunday Times as "absurdly short." That condemnation, of course, sounds quaint today; if Peel\'s skirts were absurd, after all, then Ally McBeal\'s are positively Beckettian.If, before you see the new movie, you want to do your homework and cultivate a sufficiently condescending air of authenticity, Classical Film and Music in downtown Bloomington has videos of selected old episodes. And Bloomington\'s own IU Press is the publisher of The Avengers, an unimaginatively titled but brightly packaged study of the series by NYU Cinema Studies professor Toby Miller. Miller\'s monograph is clearly an academic work; it devotes a chapter to "The Postmodern," and makes pronouncements about phenomena like "a field of knowledge inscribing \'The Avengers\' and its stars into particular positions vis--vis pop." But — savvily — the book\'s copious photographs and decidedly casual analysis locate its target audience somewhere well south of academe\'s ivory tower. It\'s like theory lite. One feels justified thumbing through pictures of a young Diana Rigg in hip boots and whalebone corsets when the text around them is referencing Umberto Eco and Ayn Rand. But Miller\'s book is a good read, and is pleasantly replete with production minutiae, trivia, and episode summaries that read surreally like someone\'s dream journal. (It\'s also, helpfully, the source of many of the background details in this article.) Miller wisely leaves it to others to extract real intellectual heft from "The Avengers\'" merriment; it was, after all, strenuous iconoclast Camille Paglia who felt compelled to assert that an Avengers-era Rigg would have been ideal to play the lead in a film version of French romanticist Theophile Gautier\'s 19th-century epistolary exploration of androgyny Mademoiselle de Maupin.What "The Avengers" did best, after all, was to exploit the potential of serial television to invest viewers in the fun of how a nuanced relationship develops between characters who are primarily engaged in navigating the outlandish perils of the world around them. The will-they-or-won\'t-they tension suffusing Peel and Steed\'s professional relationship had a distinct Scully-and-Mulder vibe, and the kiss they finally shared on Rigg\'s farewell episode was as hyped in its own way as the rumored big-screen X-Files lip-lock."My physical relations with him are, to put it mildly, ambiguous," Rigg said of her co-star. "They\'re certainly not active on the screen. They might have been in the past or then again they might in the future."These are the sorts of intricacies the new movie is hard pressed to tackle. As if to make up for that lack, the film instead makes much of the pair\'s larger-than-life gadgetry and the reliable comedy of juxtaposing the characters\' English politeness with their capacity for efficient mayhem. How many times, after all, must the movie try to persuade us that people sharing tea after an altercation or gun-toting prim British matrons chirping "Cocky little bastard" is an irrepressible hoot?The inclusion of a bizarre villain is also in keeping with the series\' tradition, and the casting of Sean Connery is clever given the old series\' track record as a training ground for future Bond girls. But building a big-budget movie around a diabolical meteorologist — imagine a megalomaniacal Chuck Lofton — begins to feel strained. Indeed, much of the movie is at once too labored and too lazy. Some of the elaborately quirky elements, like a summit of bad guys disguised as enormous teddy bears, work well and hark back to the whimsical idiosyncrasies of the series. But others don\'t. The sequence in which Steed and Peel are pursued by flying mechanical insects is pointless and puzzling, expensive without being exciting. It looks like a car commercial to be aired during the Super Bowl. The film\'s flights of fancy — a silvery hot-air balloon, a topiary maze, a set of Escher stairs, the script\'s periodic allusions to Lewis Carroll — are stylish but disjointed, like tableaux vivants, only, well, not so vivant. The story structure is so lackadaisical that when I suddenly realized we were supposedly barreling toward the climax I found it jarring. Already? But nothing has happened!What The Avengers has going for it are its two stars, especially Fiennes; he finds in Steed depths of both charm and severity that exceed the screenwriters\' (and Macnee\'s) wildest imaginings. Thurman is less consistent, but then she has taller boots to fill. And when she finally starts throwing kicks in a surprisingly lively high-wire brawl, she rises to Rigg\'s challenge. But both are struggling against dialogue, which replaces the series\' layered niceties with shallow quips and single-entendres. That Fiennes and Thurman were by necessity embarking without the rapport that Macnee and Rigg had developed is handicap enough; that the script decided to strip the characters of any history by having them first meet at the beginning of the movie is very nearly crippling.It\'s enough to make one want to go see The X-Files: Fight the Future again, because at least that movie had actors displaying a chemistry fostered by the unique medium of serial television, and a script that understood the rudiments of building, not squandering, romantic tension.The rest of the cast is wasted and forgettable, even Fiona Shaw who, Rigg-like, comes to the franchise as a British theatre pro. And by the time the movie\'s special-effects team starts dutifully demolishing Big Ben and London Bridge, all is lost; it\'s soulless and obligatory, as if they\'re menacing London only because after Independence Day, Godzilla and Armageddon, there aren\'t any landmarks in North America left to computer-destroy.The movie\'s not without its charms: Fiennes and Thurman, the production design, the bears. But ultimately, sadly enough, the most imaginative thing about The Avengers is its merchandising. The TV show, after all, launched the "Avengers Fashion Collection," including Rigg\'s beret and a zippered jumpsuit called the emmapeeler. In that light, the fact that the release of this movie finds J. Peterman selling official Avengers bowler hats for $98 is just strange and wrongheaded enough to be likable.GRADE: C-