The 2000 Charlie’s Angels is a movie that is unequivocally insane and shameless. It features absurd dialogue, delivered by Cameron Diaz, Lucy Liu, and Drew Barrymore to the best of their abilities, exaggerated wire work for its action scenes, gratuitous shots of its stars’ bodies, a soundtrack that goes from Beyoncé to Korn to Aerosmith to Michael Jackson within five minutes of each other, and early digital effects so baffling that they instantly mark the film as a product of its time. It’s impossible not to love every second of it.
Watching this new 2019 version of the property made me long for the chaotic and hilarious mood of that 2000 movie. This Charlie’s Angels, written and directed by Elizabeth Banks, is played far too straight, making it feel wholly generic and nowhere near as fun as what’s come before. It’s also saddled with a shallow, corporate, lip-service version of feminism and girl power that makes it feel like more of a relic than the 2000 version, which, even with its sleaziness, came across far smarter in its critique of society’s views towards women.
When a scientist named Elena (Naomi Scott) blows the whistle on her company’s new technology possibly being used for crime, she’s flung into the world of spies, assassins, and gadgets known as the Townsend Agency. Paired with agents (known as Angels) Sabina (Kristen Stewart) and Jane (Ella Balinska), she has to learn how to fight back against the men that seek to only watch the world burn and profit off the flames. What’s different this time around is that there are multiple Angels and Bosleys all over the world. Patrick Stewart plays a retiring Bosley while a new one played by Elizabeth Banks takes his place, but it’s obvious that the two don’t entirely trust each other.
Right off the bat, something about this reboot feels amiss and shallow. In the opening scene, Stewart speaks the first line: “I think women can do anything,” followed by a flirty giggle. Her target, Jonny Smith (Chris Pang), replies with “Just because they can doesn’t mean they should.” This is about as deep as the conversation goes. The message of women being just as, if not more, capable than men, of being able to kick ass and be smart and look good doing it, is obviously a positive one. But it’s nothing that we haven’t seen, read, or heard from movies, television, books, or activists and celebrities a million times before for decades. This would be fine if the film had anything more to offer, but it frustratingly does not.
Banks seems to think that these broad and vague statements, and the concept of a woman-led action film, are revolutionary, even groundbreaking, and so doesn’t attempt to delve any deeper into observations of feminism or the patriarchy that other films have already been doing for years. There’s nothing within Charlie’s Angels’ story or characters that offers richer, interesting themes, so it instead plays as a bland and generic action flick. It lacks the deeper and more thought-provoking ideas of femininity and the harsher critiques of men that form the essence of other films, even ones that are as light in tone as this, and its action and stunts lack the excitement of films like Atomic Blonde or Wonder Woman.
Still, the lead trio do their best, and seem to be having a good enough time. Kristen Stewart, the face of this film’s marketing despite Naomi Scott actually being the protagonist, makes it obvious that she’s much more suited for this kind of cocky, unfiltered, hot-headed character than the quiet and moody roles audiences might be accustomed to. She’s tasked with delivering the brunt of the movie’s jokes, and she certainly makes the most out of what she’s given, but it quickly becomes clear what Charlie’s Angels’ biggest issue is: It’s just not very funny.
The 2000 film is ridiculous, but its self-awareness makes it work. The humor is often outrageous but it’s all very tongue-in-cheek as well. None of that is present in the 2019 version, making it miss so much of what makes the property fun. You can either see the punchline to the jokes coming a mile away (“Don’t play with that spy gadget, it blows up!”) or they’re just uninspired to the point where the most you can offer is a shrug. At my screening, the film’s attempts at humor were almost always met with dead silence from the audience. It’s rather telling that the movie’s best moment is after it’s over – a cameo-filled credits sequence will at least have you leaving the theater in a good mood.
The 2000 film’s depiction of men is equally as entertaining; every single one of them is a drooling, dim-witted buffoon. Sam Rockwell’s villain dances like a goofball as he concocts his evil plans, Bill Murray’s Bosley is mostly a slapstick routine, and Crispin Glover’s silent assassin is wildly over-the-top, ripping out the Angels’ hair and creepily smelling it, among other bizarre choices. This Charlie’s Angels is, again, played far too straight, so its villainous men are far too generic to be considered especially enjoyable.
There seems to be a vital misunderstanding from Banks of what makes this franchise beloved by its audience. The messages of strong women overcoming odds and the men that want to keep them down are implied by the mere concept of Charlie’s Angels, so littering the film with these kind of empty sound bites without offering much else beyond that just isn’t enough to make this the hit it could’ve been. We should expect more from these kinds of empowering films, and most have been up to the task. If the goal is just plain fun without the baggage of more thoughtful subtext, then it still needs to try a little harder than this.
Despite fantastic costume design and a couple of clever sequences, Charlie’s Angels is far too bland and hollow to help lead the charge for woman-centric stories in Hollywood. It fails where others like Captain Marvel or Booksmart have triumphed this year, but it at least serves as an example of how an elementary definition of female emancipation isn’t enough to get audiences to pay for a ticket.
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