November has been pretty good to me so far. I saw Doctor Sleep and it was surprisingly good and then I watched Dolemite is My Name which is one of the best movies of the year. Finally, to break my winning streak, I checked out the Charlie’s Angels reboot and wasn’t overly surprised when it was bad.
I don’t remember much about this series. I only recall bits and pieces of the Cameron Diaz, Lucy Liu and Drew Barrymore movies. What I picked up from watching this new one is that Charlie’s Angels is an old franchise that Hollywood brought out of the geriatric ward to reintroduce to a brand new audience. Even if it’s premise feels very dated and quite cheesy by modern standards, it’s a recognisable brand so it’s no surprise they would give this ago.
It’s quite confusing but they’re not called Charlie’s Angels it’s just “Angels” and they’re like a league of super-hot kung-fu spy ladies. No uglies or fatties in this club! Whoever this Charlie guy is remains a complete mystery, but from what I gathered he’s like Hugh Hefner and we’ll say the angels live at the Playboy Mansion. The Angel league is run not by Charlie, but by Patrick Stewart who built the whole shebang. Patrick Stewart retires and passes the baton to Elizabeth Banks. She tasks her Angels to stop this new box thing that lets out electric shockwaves from getting into some evil person’s hands. So just imagine some of the evil plot from Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but with weird blue boxes.
It’s a simple movie, but it sure as hell doesn’t make a lot of sense. Whilst these girls are basically perfect, for some reason they like throwing away opportunities to stop the bad guys right there and then. It doesn’t help that these characters are written terribly. We know nothing about these girls besides that they are practically perfect in every way. The main girl, we’ll call her Jasmine, is a hacker. She can hack phones, hack doors, hack carpets, anything you need hacking, just call Jasmine.
The action isn’t that great either as it’s almost impossible to tell what’s happening. The most shocking part is it’s quite violent. People get seriously hurt! It’s such a silly movie. This is 2019 and this film thinks it’s the first movie ever to have a strong team of independent women. According to the trailers there were some new singles made by some big commercial female artists for an all female movie. I can’t comment on that because I’m not familiar with the artists plus I was distracted by all of the Audi and Jaguar product placements in this film.
To be fair the silliness and the lack of logic did add some charm to this movie. It’s quite self-aware of how silly the premise is and I did enjoy the moments where they just play around with it. There are good comedic moments and the leads handled it very well. The cast is the saving grace as they looked like they were having fun with it. The main Angels, despite the bad writing, had some good banter with each other and with some of the other characters in the movie.
Charlie’s Angels isn’t good, but it gracefully escapes from being awful. I don’t think it’s a movie I would ever watch again as not much really stood out to me, but it did make me want to refresh my memory on those 2000 Charlie’s Angels movies, so stay tuned for that. This film gets a 4/10. Watch it if you like or don’t, whatever, I don’t care. Catch ya later. I have been The Blog Complainer, signing out.
