| Last updated at 9:41 PM on 30/05/09 |
'The Avengers' movie is perfectly awful 
THIS WEEKEND ON TV
ALEX STRACHAN
Canwest News Service
SATURDAY
John Steed, Emma Peel, John Steed, Cathy Gale, Tara King, Mother - they were giants in their day. They were the central characters in one of TV's definitive series of the 1960s, and they never really went away - even though a perfectly awful 1998 movie version directed by Montreal native Jeremiah Chechik did its level best to kill them off for good.
That perfectly awful movie is repeated today on Bravo!, the homegrown arts channel that once coined the phrase "TV too good for TV."
The Avengers - the dazzling, devil-may-care original with Honor Blackman, Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee - was a staple for Bravo! for many years before the channel turned to reruns of the equally too-good-for-TV Mad Men to fill holes in its mid-week, daytime schedule.
Bravo!'s resurrecting the movie version, if only for this one night, may appear to Avengers devotees as some kind of sick joke, but Chechik's film has its purposes.
Bad movies, as veteran Time movie critic Richard Corliss once noted, often become documentaries of people trying to make a good movie.
That's the best way to enjoy The Avengers movie, then: as a rebellion against the established norms of storytelling, and a documentary of people trying to make a good movie.
Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman are talented performers but, let's face it, as John Steed and Emma Peel, they're no Macnee and Rigg.
And while an over-the-top Sean Connery, one of the silver screen's great over-actors, gives it the old-school-try as the movie's resident villain, Sir August de Wynter, there's no escaping the fact that The Avengers just might be one of the worst movies ever made.
If you haven't seen the movie The Avengers, do yourself a favour and give it a try. It's breathtaking in its sheer awfulness. Why, it's - awesome! In a rubbernecking kind-of-way. (Bravo!, 10 p.m.)
Three to see
Clint Eastwood gives it the old squint-'n'-shoot in the classic 1971 vigilante movie Dirty Harry, the flick that introduced the world to Det. Harry Callahan and immortal lines like, "I'm all broken up over that man's rights," and, "Well, then, the law is crazy." Those were the days. (AMC, 9 p.m.)
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Charles Bronson gives it the old squint-'n'-shoot in the 1974 vigilante movie Death Wish, a flick that no doubt gave real-life '80s vigilante Bernie Goetz some seriously deluded ideas. Try as he might, though, Bronson is no Eastwood. (AMC, 7 p.m.)
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Saturday Night Live repeats that funnier-than-expected show from earlier in the month with host Justin Timberlake and musical guest Ciara. (Global, NBC, 12:30 a.m.)
SUNDAY
Wallander, the Bergmanesque BBC crime drama starring an unkempt, unshaven Kenneth Branagh as the dour detective of Swedish writer Henning Mankell's series of crime novels, ends its first season tonight with a typically downbeat outing. One Step Behind finds Branagh's glum gumshoe investigating the death of three students at a Midsummer Eve's party.
As with all compelling TV mysteries - and Wallander is just about the most compelling detective series to emerge from the U.K. since Cracker - the beautiful scenery hides a seedy underbelly, where life seems mired in a never-ending series of dead ends, teens grow ever more distant from their parents and malevolence hides around every corner. (Masterpiece Mystery, PBS, 10 P.M.)
Three to see
High drama of a different kind, Into the Storm is HBO's follow-up to The Gathering Storm, a period piece about the early days of the Second World War as viewed through the eyes of Winston Churchill (Brendan Gleeson, replacing Albert Finney), and how he remained resolute in the face of terrible peril. Historical re-enactments are an acquired taste, even when they're well done, and Into the Storm won't appeal to everyone. Still, there are some fine performances, though: Gleeson, of course, and a noteworthy turn by Len Cariou as F.D.R. That's Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for anyone who skipped history in school. (HBO Canada, 9 p.m.)
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The drama in Breaking Bad comes to a boil in the second-season finale, as Bryan Cranston's meth-cooking high-school science teacher finally, finally realizes that becoming a member of the drug-peddling community was not such a good idea. (AMC, 11 p.m.)
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