Get your own Free Home Page
Okay, I admit going in to see this with a predisposition to hate it, thanks largely to all the macha posturing and forced femaraderie from its stars on the prerealease hype junket – that plus knowing it’s yet another feature debut from a music video director. And the opening scene, where Drew Barrymore masquerades as Ving Rhames and doesn’t even get his/her hair messed up by jumping out of an airliner flying 600 m.p.h. at 30,000 feet, doesn’t bode well for the notion of cinematic realism. But you know what? You want realistic, go read the manual for your breadmaker. Charlie’s Angels turns out to be kind of fun in a loud, cartoonish Spice World-meets-The Matrix sort of way.
Barrymore (she also served as producer), Cameron Diaz, and dragon lady Lucy Liu are Dylan, Natalie, and Alex, invincible robo-babe private investigators working for unseen boss Charles Townsend (voiced, as in the prototypical 70s jiggler TV series, by John Forsythe). Each tries to maintain a secret identity, complete with job and boyfriend (Tom Green, Luke Wilson, and Matt LeBlanc), but must drop everything and break out the tae kwan do and tech fu whenever Charlie calls. Their latest clients are a couple computer execs (Kelly Lynch, from Heaven’s Prisoners, and the always odd-good Sam Rockwell, from The Green Mile) whose revolutionary voice recognition software constitutes a threat to world privacy after being stolen by an egotistical media mogul (Tim Curry).
Though boasting three screenwrights whose individual credits range from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure to Titan A.E (Drew, who did one of the voices in that animated s.f. disappointment, must have exercised her clout to bring him along – along with, it’s rumored, a digital airbrush artist to help her look as waifish on film as do her costars), this fount of verbal and visual innuendo is hardly a writer’s endeavor. But then director McG (who boasts Offspring’s “Pretty Fly” and Sugar Ray’s “Every Morning” among his MTV credits) doesn’t leave much room for words (spoken words, anyway; there are lots, and lots, of songs on an incessant soundtrack that could stand to take a breath now and then but makes good use of tunes with “angel” in the title). His first full-length film is absolutely crawling with the now-requisite gymnastic cyberpunk fight scenes (including a lengthy, inspired back-alley brawl set to “Smack My Bitch Up” that I guess excuses use of the song by letting the violent femmes do most of smacking); no joke, this movie has more wire work than a Liverpool orthodontist. He also throws in a slew of automotive and aerial stunts (including a game of chicken in Formula One cars on the L.A. River Bridge), which taken together might have been boring were they not assembled with such self-conscious excess…although, to be truthful, after the fourth or fifth time the Angels survived getting blown up I started to root for the bombs.
But I’d pay to see anything that gives so much screen time to Bill Murray, as foppish harem leader Bosley, and quirky lost boy Crispin Glover, playing a fetishistic mute assassin who looks like he stepped out of a chopsocky Cabaret. Okay, and it’s also not completely unappetizing to watch Diaz, Liu, and Barrymore physically and hormonally throw men around like something you’d seen in a Russ Meyer film, minus the silicone. Yeah, I wouldn’t kick any of Charlie’s Angels off the couch. B-
Get your own Free Home Page