Metro Pulse/Movie Guru

Movie Guru Rating:
Meditative (3 out of 5)

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Sex, breasts and other icons of a television show

by Chris Neal

Between 1976 and 1981, the Charlie's Angels TV show followed the adventures of three young ladies who do the dirty work for a private investigation agency owned by the mysterious, never-seen Charlie Townsend. Dismissed at the time as a campy vehicle for brainless action and gratuitous T&A, it looks a little different in the rear-view mirror. While horny teenage boys might have been the intended audience, a generation of little girls were also watching—and what they saw were strong, smart women in charge of the action. Charlie's Angels (at least to some) became something no one expected: a feminist touchstone. That makes the new big-screen version of Charlie's Angels a curious example of subtext becoming text, a self-aware balance of eye candy for boys and role-modeling for girls. Whether this is necessary in the age of Buffy is debatable, but the result is at least a charming love letter to the original from producer and star Drew Barrymore, and at best an agreeable diversion with a welcome girl-power moral.

Plot is not a tremendous consideration here, but it reportedly took 14 screenwriters to come up with the finished script, so it would be ungentlemanly not to mention it. The Angels—Dylan (Barrymore), Natalie (Cameron Diaz) and Alex (Lucy Liu)—are assigned to retrieve kidnapped computer programmer Eric Knox and investigate the theft of his revolutionary voice-recognition technology by a rival corporation. In doing so, they are aided by Bill Murray as sidekick Bosley, who has little to do except get caught and occasionally act like Bill Murray.

Charlie's Angels is the debut film from director McG, who—it should come as no surprise to anyone seeing the movie—got his start directing music videos. It's downright predictable, then, when his film jets along for a snappy 98 minutes, propelled by quick edits and what seems like a different music cue every 30 seconds or so (admittedly finding the best use yet for Motley Crüe's "Live Wire"). McG lifts from every action-movie source he can think of, including the James Bond series, both Mission: Impossible movies, and (most obviously) the collected works of John Woo. The characters in Charlie's Angels inhabit the same hyper-reality seen in Woo films, in which each violent action is detailed in loving slow-motion from any number of angles. When Barrymore narrowly avoids being shot, we get to see the bullet inch toward her; Liu doesn't just kick oddball henchman Crispin Glover, she fairly climbs him before doing a back-flip; and Diaz, especially, seems possessed of astounding strength. All the Angels, it should be noted, are also brilliant to the point of winking self-parody, paradoxically undercutting the desired feminist tone.

Much of the (type)casting couldn't be called imaginative: Glover as a creepy fetishist, Matt Le Blanc as a dim actor (Joey, is that you?), Tim Curry as a B-movie villain. Most glaringly, Lucy Liu winds up doing the same dominatrix shtick she's done before, in Payback and on Ally McBeal. Liu appears the least comfortable of the three in her cartoony role, and when not busy beating the crap out of someone seems embarrassed to be there.

By contrast, Diaz can always be counted on to leap into a role feet-first, and she doesn't disappoint here. Early in the movie, we see her dancing around her bedroom, goofily leading with her rear, and she's the picture of unselfconsciousness. Best, though, is Barrymore. Even as some sequences tempt the viewer to imagine the trio playing in the backyard, pretending to be Charlie's Angels, Barrymore is never less than committed. Tied to a chair, she cockily informs the squad of villains who have trapped her that she's going to beat them to a pulp with her hands tied behind her back and then takes palpable glee in doing just that. At the opposite end of the spectrum, when she unzips to the waist to distract the bad guy's driver—leaning over to lick his steering wheel for good measure—I nearly fell out of my seat. She's a voluptuous, sex-positive ass-kicker.

Unfortunately, the appearance of Barrymore paramour Tom Green in a small role proves a distracting non sequitur. As a tugboat captain with whom Barrymore has a one-night stand, Green forgoes characterization to do his usual brain-damaged Tom Green routine—leaving the viewer wondering why on earth a hyper-intelligent, gorgeous young woman with a thorough training in martial arts would want to sleep with someone who seems to have crossed the line from eccentricity to mental illness a long time ago. Granted, I've asked the same question about Barrymore and Green's real-life romance, but it doesn't make much sense in the movie either.

Maybe that incongruity should be a tip-off as to how to best enjoy Charlie's Angels: don't think about it too hard.