Director: McG
Starring: Cameron Diaz,Drew Barrymore,Lucy Liu,Bill Murray
You know, I've seen a lot of movies over the years and I honestly can't remember a time in which my inherent critical sensibilities were more challenged, taunted, and flat-out befuddled than they were during Charlie's Angels (well, maybe Weekend at Bernie's II, but that's another story). I don't sit around in a little black beret gushing over the works of Godard or anything, but I do like to think of myself as a fairly intelligent and discerning filmgoer and, by all accounts, I should have despised this glitzy, over-priced piece of cotton candy fluff. And yet I found myself completely transfixed by it, drawn into its own strange poetic brilliance.
Charlie's Angels is, of course, a big-screen update of the cheesepuff 70's TV show, and the trio of bodacious crime-fighting babes has been reinvented with Cameron Diaz (as sunny, ditzy Natalie), Drew Barrymore (as buxom, badass Dylan) and Lucy Liu (as stern, poker-faced Alex). Now, I can think of worse ways to shoot an hour and a half than watching those three parade on screen in skin-tight outfits, but let's be perfectly blunt: the story is absolute garbage. For ninety million dollars, you'd think you could get more than some nonsensical, often incomprehensible, plot about a kidnapped computer wizard and some stolen hi-tech software. Supposedly something like nine different screenwriters combined to bang out nearly twenty different drafts – I suspect that each writer came into the room and typed a random word on a random page until the script was complete.
And yet Charlie's Angels is so cheerfully synthetic, so gleefully tongue-in-cheek, and so fully embracing of its turbo-charged “wink, wink” trash appeal, that it's almost impossible not to be seduced by its sense of fun. The satirical opening, in which the Angels thwart an airplane hijacker, says it all: after dumping the culprit in the waiting boat below, Liu pulls off her helmet and spends the next ten seconds swishing her hair back and forth in slow motion. In its own twisted way, that's cinematic perfection right there. And the film's “Hey-we're-all-having-a-blast!” vibe never lets up once, whether it be through Diaz gyrating in blissful ignorance at a Soul Train taping, or the trio posing as a singing telegram team of German maidens in order to obtain a retinal scan. It's even got Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore doing wire-fu, for God's sake (I can officially cross off number 117 on my list of things I never thought I'd see).
Okay, so director McG sounds like a dime-store pimp, half the movie plays like a music video, and Bill Murray, as sharp-tongued go-between Bosley, isn't given nearly enough to do. Yet none of it seems to matter – Charlie's Angels is nothing if not an exuberant celebration of mindless yet colorful Hollywood fun. For those raised on the cinema of Scorsese and Altman, it will seem like an abomination, but never has a worse movie inspired such unfettered adulation on my part. Charlie's Angels is the James Joyce of bad filmmaking.
