Cooked up in the era of disco, the Sexual Revolution and the Roger Moore James Bond films, TV’s “Charlie’s Angels” was a slick aphrodisiac for the whole family: pure ’70s glamour and hokum, an adventure show about three lightly clad female detectives who worked for their unseen boss, Charlie, sleuthing it up at resorts and stripping for action at every opportunity.
Cooked up in the era of the Internet, digital effects and Cypress Hill music videos, the film “Charlie’s Angels” is the TV series knockoff movie to end them all — we can only hope.
It’s hard to believe how bad this movie is. The TV series made an international icon of Farrah Fawcett and brought the term “jiggle show” into the language; the updated “Angels” tries to salute that past while hurling its new heroines into the future. You’d expect this picture at least to provide some big, bright, amusingly dumb fun — with, perhaps, a latter-day feminist take. But this potential big-audience movie fails in so many ways, it almost makes you dizzy. If you have any compassion, your first impulse may be to send letters of condolence to the cast — especially star Angels Cameron Diaz, Lucy Liu and Drew Barrymore (who also co-produced).
An attempt at mixing campy humor, comic book speed, dazzling Hong Kong-style martial arts, old TV allusions and a theme of female empowerment, this movie gets points for chutzpah, if nothing else. And, at the start — an Orson Welles/Robert Altman/Brian de Palma-style one-camera, long-take scene moving through an airplane and then leaping Bond-style into the air — “Angels” looks as if it might have some lightness and style.
Then the bottom drops out, as the lame dialogue and low-voltage action commence, the soundtrack fills up with every “Angel”-themed pop song except Frank Sinatra’s “Angel Eyes” and the new trio — Natalie (Diaz), Dylan (Barrymore) and Alex (Liu) — are variously flung from planes and helicopters, tossed into the ocean, blasted through windows, bound, gagged and sent out to battle with sneering gangs of Kung Fu clowns and villains.
There’s no grace or wit here, no surprise — and not even much nostalgia, though the writers do bring back two old characters: Charlie himself (voiced by the unseen original Charlie, John Forsythe) and go-between Bosley (played on TV by David Doyle and here by Bill Murray).
The movie’s first hack idea is to assign the Angels to the mysterious kidnapping of computer wizard Eric Knox (Sam Rockwell) and then to have them invade the techno-citadel of Knox rival Roger Corwin (Tim Curry, looking trapped) with a stupefying lack of stealth: Natalie and Dylan put on suits and mustaches (looking exactly like mustachioed female movie stars) and follow Alex, who’s wearing a black leather dominatrix outfit and cracking a whip at everybody.
Is that any way to look inconspicuous? But this absurd scene is the rule. There is also a ludicrous car race, a foolish Soul Train showstopper number for Natalie, a preposterous bare-naked cliffhanger for Dylan, as well as a loony scene where the major villain, for no apparent reason, blows up all his henchmen while escaping. And beyond the fact that they kick a lot of people with impunity, it’s hard to see these Angels as even comical role models: Diaz plays an L.A. ditz who blubbers on the phone with her boyfriend, Barrymore is a high-living grunge-hedonist and Liu is mostly inscrutable.
I love watching Cameron Diaz do almost anything — but here, her luminous natural wit is muted, and so are Barrymore’s zip and sass and Liu’s challenging edginess. All three are stuck in a series of unfunny comedy scenes and unthrilling action blowouts — and hobbled with romance so pallid and love interests so forgettable, it’s almost hard to recognize Matt Le Blanc as a boyfriend.
It’s also hard to recognize these Angels. When a major studio makes a movie out of an old TV show or TV cartoon character, the odds are always against the audience — and “Charlie’s Angels” is the latest self-destructing example. First-time director McG — who has made videos for Barenaked Ladies and Korn as well as the popular Gap commercials featuring dancers in khakis — has explained the movie’s theme with a rousing manifesto about beautiful women going out and fighting to “make it happen in a man’s world . . . because it’s no longer a man’s world; it’s everybody’s world.”
Noble sentiments. But, that doesn’t excuse bad movie-making. Why did McG allow the dim-witted performance of Tom Green as Dylan’s boyfriend, Chad (or, as he calls himself, “The Chad”)? Why has that charming eccentric Crispin Glover been cast as a menacing, silent heavy? Why has Murray, maybe the most lecherous-looking comedian this side of Bob Hope, been cast as the sexless intermediary Bosley? (Wasn’t Nathan Lane available? Or was he smart enough to know better?) Why is Sam Rockwell wasted in his computer nerd role and Kelly Lynch wasted with him as a femme fatale? And couldn’t they have given cameos to Fawcett or the other TV Angels ow many “Wild, Wild Wests” and “Charlie’s Angels” will it take before people learn their lessons? Just because you loved “Gilligan’s Island” on TV doesn’t mean you should rush out to see a $100 million movie rip-off starring, say, Adam Sandler as Gilligan. But I’ll bet any major studio would green-light that movie in a minute. With a little luck, it might even top “Charlie’s Angels.”
`CHARLIE’S ANGELS’
(star)
Directed by McG; written by Ryan Rowe, Ed Solomon, John August; photographed by Russell Carpenter; edited by Wayne Wahrman, Peter Teschner; production designed by J. Michael Riva; music by Edward Shearmur; produced by Leonard Goldberg, Drew Barrymore, Nancy Juvonen. A Columbia Pictures release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:32. MPAA rating: PG-13 (action violence, innuendo and some sensuality/nudity).
THE CAST
Natalie …………….. Cameron Diaz
Dylan ………………. Drew Barrymore
Alex ……………….. Lucy Liu
Bosley ……………… Bill Murray
Eric Knox …………… Sam Rockwell
Vivian Wood …………. Kelly Lynch
Roger Corwin ………… Tim Curry
Voice of Charlie …….. John Forsythe
