(Credits: Far Out / Gramercy Pictures / United International Pictures)
Wed 10 December 2025 16:15, UK
Every actor makes at least one irredeemably awful movie at some point in their career, and Sean Connery had a few stinkers in his locker, but there was only one that taught him a valuable lesson about making sure he surrounded himself with the right, or at least the most qualified, people.
Clearly, he didn’t learn his lesson, since The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen proved to be such a disastrous experience that it forced him into retirement. His hefty $17million paycheque would have helped soften the blow, but it’s an understatement to say he made an enemy of Stephen Norrington.
If anything, the original James Bond’s instincts for picking the right blockbuster roles had completely deserted him in the twilight years of his acting career. Michael Bay’s The Rock still holds up as a supreme slice of glorious nonsense, but he also turned down The Lord of the Rings‘ Gandalf and The Matrix‘s Morpheus because he didn’t understand the scripts, and they turned out just fine.
Even Entrapment, which was more solid than spectacular and did decent business at the box office, had to weather several storms, including the film’s original director, Antoine Fuqua, being fired for disagreeing with the leading man. The bigger the budget, the higher the risk, and no picture in Connery’s back catalogue encapsulated that sentiment better than 1998’s The Avengers.
A steaming turd of cinema on every imaginable level, it effectively ruined Jeremiah S Chechik’s big-screen career, almost derailed Uma Thurman’s, became Ralph Fiennes’ single biggest regret, tanked in cinemas, and landed nine Razzie nominations, although it only claimed a solitary gong for ‘Worst Remake or Sequel’.
Realising that disaster was afoot, Warner Bros hacked the director’s initial 115-minute cut down to 89 minutes, refused to screen the finished picture for critics, with scribe Don Macpherson describing the studio’s attempts to salvage anything worthwhile from The Avengers as “like listening to Stalin on crack.”
Connery was presumably well-compensated for going through the motions as the villainous Sir August de Wynter, a one-note mad scientist type with a nefarious plan to hold the world hostage by controlling the weather, which naturally obligates him to parade around in a giant teddy bear suit at one stage. It’s one of the worst summer releases in modern history, and he knew it.
“It taught me a lot,” he confessed to the Tampa Bay Times. “One learns all the time; it’s like being in love. There’s only two words: the producer and the director, and that takes care of The Avengers.” That was awfully polite from an actor who wasn’t known for sugar-coating things, but the fact that he didn’t really want to talk about it at all says more than enough.
Clearly, Connery felt that the director and the producer, Jerry Weintraub, were woefully ill-equipped to run a production of that size, scale, and magnitude. Based on the evidence, they weren’t, and Indiana Jones’ old man wished he’d never bothered to star in The Avengers at all.
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