Plot
The film opens with John Steed (Ralph Fiennes), agent of The Ministry, in a training course, which he finishes successfully. Next, we see Dr. Emma Peel (Uma Thurman) at home, where she receives a phone call telling her to go to a gentlemen's club - no women allowed - where she meets Steed for the first time. The two head off to the Ministry to meet Mother (Jim Broadbent), who informs them that the Prospero project - an attempt to influence the weather - was sabotaged apparently by Emma Peel. Mrs. Peel claims she is innocent, but she is sent to work alongside Steed to find the real culprit. Mother's off-sider, Father (Fiona Shaw), claims Mrs Peel suffers from a mental disease. They go off to visit Sir August De Wynter (Sean Connery), an old ally of The Ministry. He takes an instant liking to Mrs Peel, as they both share a love of 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. The members of a secret organisation—led by De Wynter—all wear teddy bear suits to disguise their identities. One of them, however, is a clone of Emma Peel. Steed arrives in time to save Mrs Peel, as the double jumps off a roof, but disappears. Steed and Emma go off to visit De Wynter at his mansion - but are attacked by mechanical bees. They manage to flee, helped out by Alice (Eileen Atkins), a Ministry agent. Emma is captured by De Wynter, and tries to escape, but finds herself perplexed by the mansion's ever-changing floor plan. She smashes her way through a window, and Steed rescues her. Back at Steed's apartment, however, Mrs Peel is arrested by Father, as Steed visits Invisible Jones (Patrick MacNee), a man inside The Ministry, to investigate the meaning of a map Steed found at Wonderland Weather. Steed determines Father is working with De Wynter after viewing some photos of failed genetic experiments. Father and the Mrs. Peel's clone capture Mrs. Peel, but are confronted by Mother, who is incapacitated. De Wynter - controlling Prospero and the weather - confronts the world's leaders, boasting that he controls the weather and they will buy the weather from him, they will pay a lot for it, and they have until midnight to pay.
Father and Mrs. Peel's clone take Emma to a hot air balloon, where Emma escapes during a snowstorm. Father and the clone perish in an explosion. Invisible Jones determines De Wynter is using the Prospero instruments on a secret island. Emma and Steed arrive at the island. Emma defuses the Prospero device just as a hurricane forms over London. Steed duels De Wynter, and impales him. Emma and Steed escape just as the base self-destructs, and share champagne on the roof of a building with Mother.
Read more about this topic: The Avengers (1998 film)
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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