Charlie's Angels (

2019

) ½

By this point, I've grown to expect a certain degree of “woke”, $_CURRENT_YEAR sermonizing in the umpteenth sequels and reboots of legacy franchises. From the instance that “The Force is Female” during the run-up to the latest Star Wars cash-grabs, to the insertion of obnoxious Mary Sues strong independent women in the lead roles, to the public temper tantrums of filmmakers complaining about “man-babies.” We've seen some variations on this strategy in movies as disparate as Star War: The Last Jedi (2017), Ghostbusters (2016), and Terminator: Dark Fate (2019). Personally, I cannot wait for the time when thinking a mediocre action movie sucks is no longer considered a political position. I don't hate women, I just hate these movies. To be fair, in many cases, this is just a bit of old-fashioned ballyhoo colored with a tinge of modern politics; more an attempt to cynically wedge a few butts into seats by the strength of the controversy than a serious bid to produce role models for women and girls. The filmmakers are well aware than the films their making are soulless cash-grabs, as you seldom see this sort of marketing from the occasionally good films that Hollywood releases. Aside from switching all the characters to women and the director calling anyone who didn't like the movie a misogynist, Ghostbusters (2016) didn't have much in the way of content that qualified as political grandstanding. In this respect, the latest Charlie's Angels film bucks the trend, because it leans into the political grandstanding with a level of fury and incompetence I've seldom seen before. At least it doesn't fuck around, the first shot of the film proper is a closeup of Sabina, one of the angels, looking directly at the camera and saying “I think women can do anything.” Me too Sabina, but why the hell is this the opening of an action movie? James Bond doesn't open Dr. No (1962) by telling the audience about how great the English Empire is, nor does Dirty Harry (1971) start with Harry Callahan ranting about the importance of a well-funded police force. An action movie can have political themes, but it needs to be handled with a good deal more subtlety than this. The great power of genre entertainment is, after all, the chance for escapism. How is it that the Chinese Communist Party (which backed movies like Wolf Warrior (2015) and Operation Red Sea (2018)) has a better grasp on this concept than Hollywood?

After the groan-inducing opening, the camera pulls back to reveal what's going on in the plot. The angels have targeted some low-rent ne'er-do-well by the name of Australian Johnny and are planning on bringing him in. This raises some questions right away because in previous iterations the angels had been a sort of mercenary force, taking jobs from the highest bidder but here they seem to be operating a kind of police force. We're told later than they are an NGO, but this only makes them more terrifying. A governmental body pulling a Mossad and abducting foreign citizens to stand trial abroad is unnerving enough, but a privately funded and operated agency doing the same is horrifying. It doesn't help that they've been scaled up in size from the original 3 woman tam to an organization with hundreds of members and dozens of Boselys (which made sense when it was the guy's name but is an odd-sounding rank). Are they going to turn Australian Johnny over to the proper authorities once they have him? Or do the Angels maintain a private detention facility? Given the fact that later in the film a rouge Bosely frees him for use in a sinister plot, it seems likely that it's the latter. The implications are made worse by the fact that our heroes regularly kill people too. I suspect these are all just factors that the script overlooks in order to scale up the Angels to MI:6/IMF/CIA size, but this shows a carelessness to the world-building, that presents us with some unsettling implications.

The angels' plan is to distract Johnny with Sabina's feminist lecture long enough for Jane and the rest of the team to surround the apartment and ambush Johnny and his men. This is the pre-credit sequence, so their plan goes off without a hitch, the baddie gets captured and for some reason, Bosely (Captain Picard Bosely for convenience) turns up on-site to congratulate them on a job well done. It seems like the kind of thing that can wait until later, but after the opening line and the botched world-building, it's small potatoes. We get introduced to our lead characters' sole personality traits (Sabina is the rebel and Jane is the one who plays it by the books), and from there it's off to the main credits. In Charlie's Angels (2000), the opening sequence served as a brief introduction to the three angels (three very special girls, as Charlie narrates). It established at a glance the personalities of the Angels, but that is not an option here as our angels this time around are unburdened by any personalities that need introducing. So instead we have footage of girls from around the world. It looks like something that would come from those publicity films that big corporations make to mask the fact that they are ruthless organizations that care only for the bottom line.

After this tiresome sequence, we jump ahead a year to join a female engineer, Elena, who has developed a handheld power generator that will solve the world's energy problems. There's a problem with the security though, as the device could be overridden by a hacker and made to emit a potent EMP that, in addition to disrupting electronics, could be fatal to any human nearby. I'll confess, I've never heard of an EMP harming people (unless they were in a helicopter when one went off nearby), but after a bit of research I found out that especially powerful EMPs can seriously harm a person's neuroelectric system leading to brain damage or death in some cases. Her boss, some wanker named Peter Fleming, is not interested in hearing about problems with the project, so he tells her to stow her concerns and let them rush the device out to market. The film insists that this EMP would be a perfect assassination tool, as the victims who die from it look like they've died from a stroke, but it seems like the kind of thing that could only work once to me. People are gonna realize pretty quickly what's happening when they see somebody dead and surrounded by fried electronics and the smoking remains of the power device. Still, Elena is right to think that the product should be kept out of consumer's hands until the security issue is properly patched.

Since her boss is stonewalling her, she contacts a Bosely (Black Bosely for convenience) to help her get the information to the company's founder/CEO. He takes along Sabina and Jane to help protect the girl and get her where she needs to be. The only problem is that somebody has been watching them, and dispatches one tough hombre to kill Elena and eliminate any angels protecting her. In the ensuing fight scene/car chase Black Bosely is killed and all the evidence collaborating Elena's story is lost. Jane and Sabina take Elena to the angels' safe house and regroup with another Bosely (Lady Bosely also for convenience) to plot their next move, which turns out to be a mission to secure the device prototypes. This will be considerably more difficult than they first anticipate.

Nitpicking the realism of a goofy action movie is mostly pointless. Complaining about a petite woman's ability to take down an endless parade of much taller, much heavier men here is akin to pointing out the impracticality of dual-wielded pistols in a John Woo movie. Realistic action films have their place but so do fantastic action films. None of the girls look like a bonafide bad-ass (none less so than the diminutive Kristen Stewart), but Charlie's Angels have never been physically imposing. Their strength was supposed to come as a surprise, hidden as it was behind a facade of feminine glamour. However, there are points in this film that strain even my generous credulity. When diving into the character's backstories the film begins to resemble an anime where all the characters are high school age but on their third career. Jane is a particularly ridiculous example of this where she's introduced as “ex-MI:6” Jesus lady you're like 24, the only “ex” anything you are is college student.

Issues of plausibility are only a secondary concern, the biggest problem here is the script. It's aiming at being an action-comedy, but the jokes only range from mildly-amusing to groan-inducing. Worse are the film's attempts at tenderness between the heroines, like in the scene after the death of her mentor, Black Bosely, Jane insists that she's ok, only for Lady Bosley to hug her anyway and say “hugs work.” This is some Star Wars prequel “I hate sand” levels of bad writing. I have trouble understanding how this line made it into the film, especially as the actress delivering it is both the writer and the director. I could see writing it without realizing how awkward it sounds, but how could you say it aloud? Were it any other character saying this line I'd assume it was from a desire to not rock the boat and go along with the filmmaker's vision but Banks is the filmmaker here. If the line sounds stupid she can change it on the spot. It's her movie after all.

There is a tension at the heart of Charlie's Angels that undermines all the film's feminist platitudes because the core premise of the IP is about as un-woke as they come. This was a show the was mainly about a trio of beautiful women carrying out the will of an unseen, older man with unflagging loyalty. Tellingly, the target audience of the original show was not women, but men who would be drawn in by the physicality of the actresses and the promise of thrilling action. This iteration of Charlie's Angels refuses to confront the contradiction by having Charlie hardly turn up at all (he doesn't even chime in to say “Good morning Angels” when giving the girls their mission). The voice-box only turns up twice, once at Captain Picard Bosely's retirement party and once again at the end where it's revealed that the man behind the voice-box is secretly a woman. This is frustrating because it represents such a missed opportunity for an interesting feminist film. Rather than exploit the obvious conflict between independent women and domineering patriarchy baked into the IP's premise, this film papers over the issue and hopes we don't notice how absurd it all is. The better way to handle the problematic issues inherent in the license would be to lean into the tension between the strong independent angels and their unseen male master who expects absolute obedience. Hell, you could make Charlie the bad guy and have the angels revolt against his control. It would at least justify the fact that this is a Charlie's Angels film. As it stands all it would take to make this The Lady's Detective Agency would be changing a couple of names and removing a few props from the old movies. There's no reason, beyond cynical marketing, for this to be a Charlie's Angels film, which is a shame because the franchise can be quite fun.

This film is intended as a reboot of Charlie's Angels (2000) and Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (2003), the former being a film I downright love. I am in the minority with this opinion, so allow me to justify myself. The original Charlie's Angels movie is a film that totally embraces its absurd premise and proceeds to have fun with it. The action scenes have a ludicrous quality to them, with absurd wire-fu set pieces where the angels use elaborate cheer-leading moves to defeat the bad guys. Every investigation is accomplished by donning an absurd (and usually racially insensitive) costume. There are frequent slow-mo scenes where the actresses let their hair shake in the wind like this is a shampoo commercial. Is it brilliant film-making? No, but it's a film that has its own unique personality and energy and stands apart from other popular action films. The new Charlie's Angels, by contrast, has action scenes that are utterly devoid of personality. If I watched them in isolation I would have no idea what film these scenes came from, and probably guess they were taken from a low-budget Fast and Furious spin-off. To compound the matter, while the Angels travel across the globe to various exciting locale (and Hamburg Germany), the action scenes always take place in the most boring place imaginable that could be anywhere. The worst offender is the trip to Istanbul, where the big action set-piece is in a generic factory. Am I going to have to go and replay Painkiller [2004] to get a thrilling battle unfolding in the halls of the Hagia Sophia?

Amusingly, the director/screenwriter/co-star Elizabeth Banks offered a defense of the film which in some part explains why it fails. She argues that the movie is vital because “You’ve had 37 Spider-Man movies... I think women are allowed to have one or two action franchises every 17 years — I feel totally fine with that.” Banks is seemingly unaware of all the female-led action films that have appeared in the past two decades, seemingly operating under the delusion that it's been nothing but Rambo and James Bond since Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (2003) was released. I won't mention Wonder Woman (2017), or Captain Marvel (2019), or Electra (2005) because those are comic book movies and Banks argues in the same interview that “that's a male genre” (though it does raise the question, why does she think action/spy films are any less a male genre than super heroes). I'll even do her a solid and discount Alita: Battle Angel (2019) because that's based on a manga, which is kind of like a comic book you read backwards. That just leaves all six Resident Evil movies, all six Underworld movies, Salt (2010), Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003), Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004), Aeon Flux (2005), Ultraviolet (2006), Atomic Blond (2017), Lucy (2014), Anna (2019), Bumblebee (2018), Peppermint (2018), Ghost in the Shell (2018), and The Hunger Games series to name a few. In addition, there's plenty of action films like the later day Fast and Furious movies where you get a pretty even mix of male and female action stars in the cast. Any fan of the genre would know that female lead action films have been nothing remarkable in Hollywood since the 1980s (The Terminator (1984) and Aliens (1986) most obviously), in independent American film since the 1970s (Foxy Brown (1974) and Coffy (1973) among others) and in Chinese cinema since the 1960s (Come Drink with Me (1966) is the earliest example I can think of, but there are probably others that predate it). Any fan of action movies would know this, but I suspect that Elizabeth Banks is no fan of the genre. That's why she can claim with a straight face that no female-led action movies have been released in the last decade and a half. She hasn't seen any. It's also why her action movie is so uninspired and generic. She has no love for the genre and sees this film only as a chance for tiresome virtue signaling.

About the only good thing I can say about Charlie's Angels is that after the abysmal opening it mostly settles into the routine of being a generic action movie, rather than being a 2-hour struggle session. Hey, at least it's better than Chai-Lai Angels (2006).