British television series The Avengers (1961-1969) helped to define the 60s almost as much as The Beatles and the James Bond films, an often surreal, always distinctive set of adventures revolving around secret agent John Steed (Patrick Macnee) and a string of mainly female sidekicks. It was a hugely popular series, revived as The New Avengers in 1976, and a film adaptation must have seemed the logical next step. Unfortunately, the film we got, directed by Jeremiah S. Chechik, is an almost textbook example of something being made by people who haven’t the faintest idea of what made the original property so beloved. It’s an unmitigated disaster from beginning to end, scuppered by a dreadful script, sunk by a lack of chemistry between its two leads and the wreckage left to rot by a fanbase that had every right to feel thoroughly let down by it.

The script, by Don Macpherson (a Brit so perhaps he should have known better) seeks to transform the charmingly offbeat series into a big budget action blockbuster and serve as a sort of “origin” story for the Steed/Mrs Peel partnership. Steed (Ralph Fiennes) and meteorologist Dr Emma Peel (Uma Thurman) are called in to The Ministry where they are tasked by Mother (Jim Broadbent) to investigate the Prospero project, a weather control system that Peel apparently tried to sabotage. She maintains her innocence and Mother’s second-in-command, Father (Fiona Shaw), suggests that Peel is suffering from a mental illness. The pair visit Sir August de Wynter (Sean Connery), a former Ministry scientist and investigate Wonderland Weather, a business that creates artificial weather (presumably a joke at the expense of that most British of obsessions). De Wynter turns out to be the leader of a secret organisation (who dress in teddy bear costumes at meetings) who is planning to hold the world to ransom with its control of the elements. Steed and Peel are attacked by mechanical flying insects, discover that de Wynter has a clone of Mrs Peel and are forced to deal with a traitor in their ranks. It all culminates in a showdown on a remote island where de Wynter has installed the Prospero device.

There’s so much wrong with The Avengers that it’s hard to know where to start so let’s being with some positives. It won’t take long hard as there are precious few of them. It’s a good-looking film, excessively overdesigned perhaps (The Avengers were not suited to the vast, Ken Adams-like sets of the Bond films – their best adventures took place in unassuming Home Counties settings) but beautifully photographed. And it’s nice to hear the famous The Avengers theme now and again. And that’s about it. It’s a film that rapidly descends into a tiresome parody of the very thing it’s trying to revive and coming close to besmirching the series it’s based on.

Fiennes and Thurman are fine actors, but John Steed and Emma Peel they most certainly are not. Fiennes can’t quite get a grip on Steed and Thurman entirely lacks the playful flirtatiousness that Diana Rigg had so memorably brought to the role. The lack of chemistry between them is only underlined by an ill-advised attempt at a romance between the two (part of the fun of the Emma Peel period on television was the will-they, won’t-they relationship between the two) but the fact that the script never gets to grips with what makes the characters tick is the biggest disappointment. It could have been a lot worse, mind – the original casting idea was for Mel Gibson and Nicole Kidman to take the roles. She might have been OK, but Gibson as the suave and charming Steed? Really?

Connery gives one of the very worst performances of his career as de Wynter, playing him, as per the script in fairness, as a lecherous, wild-eyed lunatic, a parody of the super-villains of the Bond films. The opening titles and music also suggest that the producers really wanted to make a Bond film and somehow mistook The Avengers for the small screen equivalent. Casting Connery as the villain is of a piece with that, but he seems so embarrassed by it all that sending the whole thing up was his only way to process it all. The rest of the supporting cast, which, apart from Broadbent and Shaw, includes Eddie Izzard, Eileen Atkins, Keeley Hawes (who might have made a better Mrs Peel) and Macnee as the uncredited voice of an invisible agent, come and go without making any impact at all.

Checkik has spent his career trying – in vain – to live up to his debut, perennial seasonal comedy favourite National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989). He had form in messing with favourite properties, having remade Henri-Georges Clouzot’s masterpiece Les Diaboliques (1955) as the bland and forgettable Diabolique (1996) and any attempt to raise his profile with The Avengers crashed and burned when he was nominated for Worst Director at the 1998 Golden Raspberry Awards, losing out to Gus Van Sant for his remake of Psycho (1998 wasn’t the best of years…) His handling of the action scenes, particularly the climatic fight around the Prospero machine, is sloppy, the editing slack and the effects frequently awful.

But even the most sensitive and skilled of directors would have struggled with the terrible script. The weather control gimmick has a certain currency in these global warming ravaged days (though writer Colin Finbow and director Sidney Hayers did it much better – and a lot cheaper – in the 1965 television episode A Surfeit of H2O), but the story lacks any kind of sense of purpose. It’s largely just a whole load of surreal, fitfully amusing images searching for some sort of narrative to hold them all together. Attempts at “Englishness” (Steed and Peel making tea while driving through the countryside in his vintage Bentley) are often laughable and as action film, let alone an Avengers film, it commits the cardinal sin of being plain boring.

To blame Macpherson alone for this would be to do him a disservice. After test screenings, Warner Bros. executives got cold feet, suggesting that things weren’t that great all along, and slashed the film down from 115 minutes to just 89, with all the attendant continuity and coherence problems that comes with that (one publicity image shows the clone of Mrs Peel about to enter a payphone, an entrance to a secret base, but the scene it came from is nowhere to be seen in the film itself though it is in the trailer below). The end result was such a mess that Warners opted not to screen it for the press, a sure sign that they were aware of just what a dreadful film they had on their hands. When critics paid their own money to see it anyway, their verdict was unanimous – it was a disaster – and it consequently flopped at the box office.

It brought The Avengers “franchise” to an ignominious end and today it seems unlikely that we’ll see Steed and his sidekicks return, for fear of them being mistaken for the box-office-record breaking Marvel superhero team of the same name. And it’s probably right and proper. The Avengers was very much a product of the 1960s (The New Avengers was fun, but it was very different beast) and probably just wouldn’t work today – even Bond and Mission: Impossible had to be modernised for contemporary audiences, a process that The Avengers seems singularly unsuitable for. It’s just a crying shame that it all had to come to end in such a ham-fisted, insensitive and frankly dreadful fashion. A quarter of a century later, it’s got no better at all.