Set-piece theatre. (Charlie's Angels (DVD))

Member Name: Brett Bligh

Product:	Charlie's Angels (DVD)
Date:	20/06/01 (22 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A generally good cast, well choreographed screen action, good variety of music.

Disadvantages: Attempts to be too clever for its own good, has no concept of pacing, not all music tracks are suitable.

To be honest I was not quite sure what to make of ‘Charlie’s Angels’ the first time I saw it, but then a friend told me that the director, enigmatically referred to as “McG”, had previously been responsible for only music videos. Now that explains a lot.

Charlie’s Angels is essentially a very flippant, reasonably enjoyable and relatively disposable piece of cinema, an action flick content to poke fun at its own genre in that oh-so-postmodern way to such an extent that it risks jumping the genre barrier of the action movie and becoming a full-on comedy piece. It is also very aware of its own flaws and the weight of audience expectations, and sends those up with just as much irreverence as it does the rest of the movie-mythos in its more outwardly aimed puns.

Based, of course, on the popular Seventies show of the same name, Charlie’s Angels essentially concerns a trio of “beautiful” and “brilliant” crimefighters: bashful and easily impressed Natalie (Cameron Diaz); outgoing and unlucky-in-love Dylan (Drew Barrymore); and Alex, a generally confidant woman who nonetheless is having problems with the side-effects of keeping her identity as a superhero a secret. All three of these work for the eponymous Charlie, a mysterious character whom none of them have ever met and who only ever contacts them by voice, together with Bosley (Bill Murray), whose role is as frontman for the anti-crime organisation.

After a brief introductory section involving a bomb on a plane, the film moves rapidly and somewhat conventionally to its central plot. A young engineer by the name of Eric Knox (Sam Rockwell), founder of Knox Technologies and a hot tip for future billionaire status, has been kidnapped. The likely suspect in the case is Roger Corwin (Tim Curry), owner of megacorporation Red Star Systems who, were he able to combine the technology his company already owns with that being developed by K
now Technologies, would be able to form the most advanced intelligence surveillance network the world has ever seen, which would be able to track down anyone, anywhere in the world using only their voiceprint. The Angels are assigned to work with Vivian Wood (Kelly Lynch), Knox’s business partner, in order to find the missing entrepreneur and discover whether, in fact, Red Star has stolen the technology which Knox Technologies are developing.

The investigation, as expected, involves the use of many state of the art gadgets together with spectacular martial arts in order to uncover the truth behind the case and bring the perpetrators to justice. But all is not as simple as it seems, and with the Angels seemingly playing along right according to their secrets nemesis’ plan the scene is set for a high octane denouement with the future of their very organisation at stake…

I think it would probably be wise to state reasonably early in this review that I did not feel entirely satisfied with this film for those who did not grasp that from the three-star rating I awarded. Why precisely this was eluded me for a while after viewing, and I had to give thought to quite a few possible alternatives before I finally arrived at what I believe to be the correct solution.

The casting is generally quite good. Diaz, Barrymore and Liu are pretty well suited to their roles, with all three obviously fit and well able to cope with the rigorous action demands the film makes as well as being a well matched threesome who generally manage to create the impression of a group of people complementing each other rather than competing for screen time. Bill Murray plays the kind of light comedy role he specialises in and to predictably good effect, whilst Tim Curry, as always, hams it up beautifully as he has done before in projects both excellent and dire (‘Lexx’ / ‘Home Alone 2’ respectively, methinks?). Perhaps the one major cas
ting anomaly as far as I was concerned was the appearance of Matt LeBlanc in the role of Alex’s boyfriend; LeBlanc is one of a select few actors (Will Smith also being among them) whose very presence onscreen makes me want to vomit. Fortunately, however, LeBlanc’s role, a typically smarmy and cocksure character, is actually rather small in this film, and I cannot attribute my dissatisfaction with this entire production to such a small annoyance (as I could with, say, the wretched ‘Lost in Space’ movie).

The music is also generally okay, composed as it is of a wide ranging selection of tracks from many popular artists such as Korn, Mötley Crüe, Wham!, Apollo Four Forty, Prodigy, Aerosmith, Leo Sayer, Blur, Michael Jackson, Fatboy Slim, Rod Stewart and even Spandau Ballet! Not all of the music, of course, in such a wide ranging selection, is going to be to my liking, and perhaps most notably I disliked the track which accompanies the start of the end credits proper (unfortunately I do not know the title of that particular track, but it is some kind of RnB number), but in the majority of cases the music seems appropriate to the current scenario and indeed the action onscreen seems to react to the music as if the entire scene were filmed with that piece of music in mind.

In a similar vein the way in which the film is directed cannot be described as anything other than energetic. Vastly complex scenes, sometimes involving complex stunts and sometimes large numbers of people (and sometimes both), are executed with considerable flair and ingenuity. CGI effects, Hong Kong-style wire work, large scale dance displays … the screen is awash with spectacle for almost the entire duration of the film.

And perhaps this is the problem, and ties in with the observation I might right at the very start of this review about McG directing music videos before this film. In a music video, the director has a little over three minutes
to cram in as much visual excess as can possibly be managed; not only is this acceptable, it is actually expected, and the phrase ‘MTV-generation’ has even been used to describe those with extremely limited attention spans who do not tend to concentrate for more than that three minutes or so which is the duration of a pop video.

A feature film, however, is a different matter altogether. In a feature film, or at least in a large budget film intended to be a blockbuster, it is essential that there are the cinematic fireworks — explosions, stunts, the shouting of carefully worded phrases of anger by an indignant hero against a generally indifferent villain. It is also essential, however, to have moments of calm between these tumultuous turns of events. Essentially, a film should vary itself in a kind of wave pattern — troughs of relatively low action content whose purpose is to prepare the audience and build up their expectations of what us to come, especially with regard to developing audience affection for the central characters so that what occurs to them seems all the more poignant, followed by peaks of action, the cinematic fireworks mentioned earlier.

In this way, when an action scene occurs, a good director will not only be able to call upon good quality cinematography and action choreography to make what happens onscreen excite the audience. He will also be able to rely on what has gone before having ALREADY riled the audience up beforehand.

Charlie’s Angels does not attempt to work in this manner, and it is this which leads to the film not living up to its full potential. Instead of operating as a waveform, this film attempts to keep an action flow going throughout the entire film; to use the same analogy, then, Charlie’s Angels operates as a straight line. Shakespeare used to insert periods of calm into his plays, often light-hearted moments which do not ruin the play since Shakespeare is always a
ble to bring back the tension on command later; Kurosawa made us wait three hours for the carnage at the end of ‘Seven Samurai’, and it was all the more effective for it. But McG has no such intention whatsoever.

Essentially, McG has attempted to craft one long music video, and he has actually succeeded in creating a film which feels like one music video after another, perhaps 25 of these little snippets stuck together whose total running time is 90 minutes or thereabouts. Unfortunately, however, there is no real build up — one action scene follows another in a long string and, after a while, they simply become tedious no matter how well staged they are. Also, since there is so little ‘character time’ aside from that devoted to showing off the lead trio’s obvious good looks and natural cutesiness, we really do not care whether they win or lose (or at least I grew not to). In fact, the scene where Knox shoots Dylan and she flies backwards through the window was, at the time, the scene which impressed me most in the entire film; I hoped Dylan was dead because this would have signified a narrative change of direction, a source of motivation for the other characters and, frankly, something that was totally unexpected. But this was not to be.

Essentially, this film suffers from the same problems which were responsible for ‘Titan AE’ being so (justly) maligned. But where Titan AE was an experiment, a cartoon which the critics were just waiting for the excuse to pan, Charlie’s Angels is a film featuring beautiful women, explosions and an approximation of wit (the problem with the jokes herein is just that they do not know when to stop — Alex doing Kung Fu whilst reciting the move names such as “King Kong Palm” provoked a wry smile from me since I have seen ‘Iron Monkey’ et al, but when she finished off by reciting “and that’s kicking yo’ ass” it was
Fetch The Bucket time).

On that basis, audiences were content to sit back and switch off, whilst the critics decided to let the film by relatively unscathed. Charlie’s Angels is not a bad movie, and it certainly has its moments, but with better pacing and a bit of script rewriting, it could have been so much better.

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