The Avengers
**½/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Samuel L. Jackson
screenplay by Joss Whedon
directed by Joss Whedon
by Walter Chaw Joss Whedon delivers his definitive artistic statement with the completely inoffensive, agreeably stupid Marvel's The Avengers. It's a giant, loud, sloppy kiss planted right on the forehead of a fanboy contingent that will somehow find jealous dork solidarity in the largest product excreted this year by a Hollywood machinery that's the playground now of Whedons and Apatows and Farrellys, where it used to be the domain of John Fords and Sam Peckinpahs and Von Sternbergs. Not a full-grown man among them, they're drunk on power and nerd cred, making references to their references and amazed that someone like Scarlett Johansson returns their calls (or that they could be married to someone like Leslie Mann in a world not gone mad). The Avengers is a brilliant balance of indecipherable against crowd-pleasing, with bouncy fight scenes, one-liners as character development, and the absolute confidence that everyone in the audience has on purpose seen each of the films designed as a prequel to this one. As the pendulum swings back to pleasuring 18-year-old boys vs. 16-year-old girls (despite Titanic in 3D's attempts at swinging it back), take heart that if, at the end, it only reminds of the loudest, most expensive team-up episode of "Shazam!", it at least has the sense to deliver the best Hulk moments…ever.
In a nutshell, as if it matters: Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), head of super-secret government agency S.H.I.E.L.D., assembles the titular super-freaks to battle Norse god Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and his band of bloodless, PG-13 battle droids (plus a troika of armoured, flying manatee). Loki can either teleport or project a hologram of himself, making him a formidable foe to brother Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Captain America (Chris Evans), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Black Widow (Johansson), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), Hulk (three terabytes or so), and, hey, isn't that Jenny Agutter over there on that screen? There's some dialogue (unfortunately), some tense-like arguments, and some jokes about how even square Cap understands a reference to The Wizard of Oz, how insufferable Iron Man likes Point Break, and how mild-mannered Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) just can't catch a break. There's no character development, in other words, with romance-like moments introduced and dropped with equal haste; the development of a civilized Hulk introduced and mysteriously fulfilled; and the introduction of Asgard into the "real" world introduced and…yeah, never mind. On the bright side, when it comes time to finally level Manhattan, The Avengers goes a long, long way to erasing memories of the near-identical destruction of Chicago in Transformers: Asshole.
Meanwhile, Jackson confirms that he's stopped trying, Whedon subsumes the things that made him irritating in favour of new things that make him anonymous, and best not to spend too much time wondering why it is first that it's an advantage to have a flying aircraft carrier, then why said carrier doesn't launch its arsenal against the alien threat. The Avengers doesn't make a lick of sense, in other words, and doesn't have to. It's a giant, bullying, bruising flex of brand and pop archetype. It doesn't miss the trick of a post-credits sequence setting up the beloved villain of the inevitable sequel–doesn't miss any tricks, in fact, en route to providing every single thing its intended audience wants (but not a damn thing more). It's pleasantly homoerotic, references the Holocaust in a random sequence, and offers absolutely no stakes or doubt in outcome in a film stocked full with indestructible superheroes. The Avengers, finally, has no inner life–there's nothing to explore here, except maybe the ways that men express their insecurities in the avatars they create, giving some good Freudian weight to a sequence where Hulk hunts Black Widow in the bowels of a flying ship. But whenever it threatens to be about something–like when Bryan Singer or Chris Nolan direct a superhero movie–Whedon reveals he lacks the confidence to be much more than the operator of the world's most expensive amusement park ride. Still, for the last hour or so, it's a great one.
Is it so wrong that geeky filmmakers have inherited the multiplexes? I’m sure it’ll be another personality type’s turn in 15-20 years.
there’s nothing wrong, per se with geeky filmmakers–i think Walter’s just demanding more substance from said geeky filmmakers. they are certainly capable of much more, or at least they appear to be.
The irony, in theory, with middle-aged manchild geek-directors making films aimed squarely at the nerdy teen-boy demographic is that when these teen nerds grow up and become the next generation of filmmakers, they will imitate the films of their youth, thus making them even more immature and adolescence-stunted by comparison. While Whedon and Apatow were undoubtedly raised on a steady diet of ‘adult red-blooded-male directors’ (i.e. hard-drinking bar-fighting macho assholes who’d seen world war firsthand), now they get to make male-nerd-fantasy cartoons for the comic-book-masturbationist subsect…and those directors will make watered-down versions of those movies for the next generation who will make watered-down versions for the next, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum.
In summation…we’re doomed.
Now a John Milius take on the Avengers-that would have been interesting!!!! I’m sure the pendulum will swing away from comic book properties eventually…
Good to see the comments back…hope a fanboy blowback doesn’t send them away again.
I felt that the film captured the characters quite well – though they do not change through the movie –, and I’d give the film 3 stars. Probably as good as can possibly expected from such a studio behemoth.
There need to be sequels and new spin-offs, the continuity cannot be challenged, there must not be a vulnerable hero*, it must all be inoffensive and marketable, …
*Black Widow, of course, lets herself be outfoxed by the men she interrogates, a tactic no male superhero would get away with in the eyes of the rump of comic book geeks, so full of sexism and entitlement. Also, it says a lot that just the presence of one more slightly competent female character surprised me, whereas Nick Fury is apparently the only black – non-white, even – person in the whole of SHIELD.
(And our first shot of Widow is her being bound to a chair and hit in the face)
Love the new site format!
I’m with Mike. Culture is dead.
i feel we need a Kurosawa of our generation…but alas, there’s none to be found. Pop culture is like a black hole from which there’s no escape.
Tarantino and Anderson (Paul Thomas and Wes) are two that come to mind that show our culture is not dead. 90% of everything has always been shit. Fortunately it’s even easier to find the gems nowadays thanks to the internet.
Things look less dire when filmmakers such as Guillermo del Toro, Brad Bird, Sam Raimi, and Johnnie To become the standard-bearers for the genre cinema in the geek era. There are other names of course (Neil Marshall for horror, Alfonso Cuaron for his Potter sequel) but each of these guys has made a super-hero film with creative integrity and emotional stakes (if one accepts To’s “Running on Karma” as a hybrid of kung-fu and super-heroism in the vein of Spider-Man — leaving aside his less distinguished work in the more straight-forwardly comic-booky Heroic Trio).
For me, the problem isn’t that the geek crowd has conquered the multiplex, but that the passive-aggressive pose of fandom has so thoroughly saturated the public discourse. Instead of asking genre material to be taken seriously for its artistic merit (the goal of the auteurist criticism that enthroned John Ford and the comic-book revisionism that canonized Alan Moore), most of the writing I’ve seen from self-described fans repeats the demand only the concerns of the cult should touch the precious text.
Whedon has his moments; his followers are insufferable.
“For me, the problem isn’t that the geek crowd has conquered the multiplex, but that the passive-aggressive pose of fandom has so thoroughly saturated the public discourse.”–agreed, you summed up my thoughts exactly. I blame Big Bang.
My only problem with this review is that J.J. Abrams is not listed among the adolescents currently running Hollywood.
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This new set up is confusing. Why did it change?
I spent the whole second half waiting for Thor to power up Ironman with lightning like when they were dueling but it never happened 🙁