Charlie's Angels

The new cinematic take on Charlie's Angels tosses away the emphasis on the "jiggle" and "assets" that made the original 1970s TV show such a huge hit back in the day, and instead gives us a heavy dose of "You Go, Girl!" empowerment.  This is evident right from the beginning, as the film's opening credit sequence is comprised of clips of random women doing sports and other kickass things.  Writer-director Elizabeth Banks (who also co-stars in the film) lets us know what she's going for early on with her take on the franchise, and does not let up.  She's here to say that women can do anything, even save the world, just as long as they stick together.

It's an admirable goal, but it never quite leads up to an admirable or even good movie.  That's because in her quest to empower the young ladies who might be watching, she has overlooked what should have been another crucial part of the movie - to make it fun.  As a hopeful kickoff to a new film series, this is a surprisingly generic attempt that never gets off the ground.  Part of the fault lies with Banks' bland script, which never manages to quite raise the stakes high enough for its female heroines, nor does it create any interesting personalities.  The rest of the blame lies at the feet of the three actresses who have taken on the mantle of the Angels (Kristen Stewart, Ella Balinska, and Naomi Scott).  They're not terrible together, but they fail to create a kind of magnetic chemistry on screen that makes us want to see their adventures continue over multiple movies.

The action centers around Scott's character, Elena, who starts the film off as a whistleblower at a big tech company she works for.  She helped develop a device that could revolutionize the clean energy market, but it has a fatal flaw in its design that if put in the wrong hands and weaponized, could be used for the purposes of global terrorism.  Her desire to get the truth out into the open pulls her into the crime-fighting world of the Angels, which in this movie, is less the small detective agency that it was in the original TV series and earlier movies from the 2000s, and more like an international spy agency with branches and members all over the world.  Elena teams up with the fun-loving Sabina (Stewart) and the stoic and largely unemotional Jane (Balinska), who work under the watchful eye of Bosley (Elizabeth Banks), to stop some criminals who are trying to steal the technology and wipe out anyone who might be trying to warn the world of the potential danger.

Each of the three leading female characters fill a required role in the plot.  Scott's Elena is the wide-eyed innocent who gets pulled into the world of the Angels, and serves as the audience's eyes into the film's universe.  Stewart and Balinska basically fill the roles of the fun-loving girl who can throw a punch when needed, and the much-more serious minded one who is calculating and efficient, but needs to learn to trust her other team members, respectively.  Surprisingly, the bond that is supposed to form between the women during the adventure does not hold a lot of weight on the plot, as the movie is too busy careening its heroines to different corners of the world in order to track down who the mastermind behind the scheme is.  The movie is so busy reminding us that women can do anything that it never stops long enough for the three women to create any likable chemistry.

Maybe this wouldn't matter so much if the movie was more fun and thrilling, but it never manages to create any genuine excitement.  The action scenes that do pop up periodically are often shot tightly and with fast editing, so we sometimes don't get a good look at what's going on.  We get a lot of exotic locations for the Angels to visit, but instead of doing anything cool or exciting, they're mostly reciting the script's lame banter, which includes jokes about how women are always hungry.  We do get quite a few scenes of the Angels using disguises to infiltrate various places (a requirement of Charlie's Angels from Day One), but aside from a scene where the women have to sneak around the tech company without getting spotted, they never really amount to much. 

The only angle that Banks hits on with her take that worked with me is the idea of turning the Angels into a kind of global operation that features not only multiple women fighting evil, but also multiple handlers who all go under the code name of "Bosley". (Patrick Stewart turns up in a small role as the original Bosley.) Still, even this idea is not explored as much as it should have been.  I have a hunch that the hope is the film will do well enough to spawn sequels that will expand the film's world.  But, given what's on display here, I would say the hope for sequels is largely wishful thinking.

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