High flying, high kicking, and girls who know how to play hard and have fun! The new Charlies Angels!
A trio of elite private investigators armed with the latest high-tech-tools, high performance vehicles, martial arts techniques, and a vast array of disguise unleash their state-of-the-art skills on land, sea, and air to track down a kidnapped computer ace and keep his top-secret voice-identification software out of lethal hands.
Say what you will about Hollywood churning out films based on old television series, but Charlies Angels might be the best female-led chop-socky action flick to be
produced in this country. Not only is it funny, but Angels Action sequences are just as good as any blockbuster that came out this past summer.
For those of you not old enough to remember that television show (I am one of them), Angels was about three sexy secret agents who worked for the Charles Townsend Detective Agency. The Angels (and viewers) never saw Charlie, but he assigned their cases via phone calls to an intermediary named Bosley, portrayed in the movie by Bill Murray.
Cases were always wrapped up each week, and the pistol-wielding Angels were always sure to find themselves in another precarious predicament in exactly seven days time.
In the movie, the pistol-less Angels are played by Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, and Lucy Liu, who play respectively, the brain, the muscle, and the daredevil of the outfit. They are a giggly group of girls who, for some reason, are forced to assume secret identities to blend into society. Angels opening credits show clips of the characters childhood before launching into a hysterical montage of all things 70s.
The films first big action sequence takes place on airplane, where a character played by LL Cool J discovers that a fellow passenger has a bomb on board. He grabs the terrorist and leaps out of the planes emergency exit, plummeting toward choppy water below. We later learn that the Cool J character is really Dylan (Drew Barrymore) in a latex mask and voice alteration chip.
The Angels have several run-ins with a nameless character play by Crispin Glover, who has no lines, wields a cane like Bond baddie and fights like Carrie-Anne Moss in the Matrix. Their battles include many gravity-defying kicks, which look suprisingly believable from Liu and Diaz (but not Barrymore). Strangely, Liu has landed in two of the best American Action films of 2000 (this and Shanghai Noon), but Diaz really steals the show as the gangly Natalie. Barrymore does double duty as star and producer.
Angels is the feature film debut for McG, who has directed a bunch of popular music videos and award winning commercials. He paces the film well and adds a good mix of period music and modern rock, as well as obligatory hipped-up version of the original theme song. The best part about the film is that it never takes itself too seriously (they mock television-series-turned-feature-films in one scene) and, as a result, it looks like everybody had a blast making the movie (the closing credits include funny outtakes).
