BEFORE: This is another last-minute drop-in, which feels like I'm taking a bit of a chance. I still need to figure out a chain that's going to get me from "Wonder Woman '84" to the start of October's movies, and until I do that, I can't really be sure which films are going to be essential for that linking. So by dropping in this film here that only JUST started airing on cable, and focusing on just the one actor who's in it that is also the star of several movies this week, I'm ignoring the other connections I could make with this film. Kristen Stewart, for example, but I already know that I'm not going to be starting October off with the "Twilight" series, I've got a different lead-in for that planned, so no real worries there. One other actor links to a romance film on my list, and two others link to horror movies on my list, so I THINK I'm OK by adding this one here. I'll have to flip two films with McConaughey around to get the "right" one to land in the #3,600 slot, but that's easily done.
The justification is that right now the July chain is a little short, which really shouldn't be a big deal since I've watched an extra movie each month so far in 2020. This is the first month where my plan is a couple days short, of course I COULD take a day off, but again, since I don't know the August/September chain just yet, it's hard to know how many slots I'm going to need. I've got to fill in the rest of the late summer schedule ASAP, I think. However, if I find out later that in order to make my chain work out in September, I'll need to find a film that somehow, impossibly has both Patrick Stewart and Michael Strahan in it, then I'm going to be bummed, because I wasted it here.
Djimon Hounsou carries over again from "Seventh Son" to play one of several "Bosleys".
THE PLOT: When a young systems engineer blows the whistle on a dangerous technology, Charlie's Angels are called into action, putting their lives on the line to protect us all.
AFTER: I know, I know, but honestly I was JUST curious enough to watch this to find out how bad it really was, the suspense was killing me. This film got released in November of last year, and didn't seem to break any box office records, so that leads me to wonder why. Did they not respect the franchise? Was it just so far-fetched as to be completely unbelievable, or what? Or did it just get killed by Oscar-worthy (as opposed to Oscar-eligible) films like "Ford v Ferrari"?
Well, yes, yes and yes. This film IS that bad, and it represents a strange left turn for the franchise, but also, it did get killed by "Ford v Ferrari" at the box office. They spent about $48 million making this, and just think about what could have been accomplished if that money had instead gone to cure some disease, or champion some noble cause - but it only took in $17 million in the U.S. Worldwide it made $73 million, so at least there are some countries out there where it succeeded, places where it's still something of a novelty to see women driving cars and shooting guns and kicking ass, but I'm afraid in the U.S. this might be old hat, or simply one reboot too many.
If you go back to the origins of "Charlie's Angels" as a franchise, it's sort of easy to see where they took an odd turn. The original TV show was about a detective agency, three women (at first) who'd done well at the police academy, but felt their talents were being wasted writing parking tickets or being asked to file thing or make coffee down at the local precinct. Charlie Townsend "took them away from all that" and put them to work on glamorous jobs, like, umm, going undercover in jail and getting deloused, then escaping while in chains through a muddy swamp. But hey, that was just for sweeps week.
The two films starring the trio of Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu took the simple concept to a new level, made the three agents into something more like spies, dealing with higher-level crimes and working for the Department of Justice, this meant traveling around the world, wearing more elaborate costumes, doing more elaborate stunts, and kicking ass more elaborately overall. I approve the "leveling up", but it seems that now things have gone just a bit too far. This film takes the new Angels to Germany and Turkey and pits them against an elaborate scheme to transform a new method of generating power into some form of killing machine. See, we're in James Bond territory now, and we're so far away from the original detective agency that it's hard to see how we got from THERE to HERE.
Most likely, though, I suspect the fault lies with the screenwriting, and somebody who's probably seen so many cool spy movies that she forgot that Charlie's Angels are NOT spies, they're detectives. Cool, beautiful, talented detectives, but that's not the same thing as spies. In a way, this film suffers from the same problem that "Smokin' Aces" and "Faster" displayed last week - namely, a writer dropped in a whole bunch of cool things that they've seen in other movies in the same genre, without paying much attention to whether those pieces, when stitched together, form a new coherent whole. "Faster" had all the cool pieces of several other heist movies, the getaway driver with the fast reaction skills, the guy released from prison tracking down all the people who done him wrong, the dirty cop, and the hired killer, and then the story just resulted from putting all these toys in the same sandbox and making them play together. "Smokin' Aces" borrowed the false-face bit from "Mission: Impossible", and threw that together with a bunch of other stereotypes from hit-man movies, and tried to do the same thing.
"Charlie's Angels" does that with elements from spy films - the tracking devices, the evil genius who wants to destroy the world, the cool tech devices that knock enemies out or allow them to communicate with each other - only remember, these women aren't spies! So, then, umm, what are they? They don't seem to be working for the U.S. government, or the United Nations, they're still an "agency" with more cool tech than the CIA, but what's their agenda? They do what's right, but who's deciding what that is? It must be a very thin line that distinguishes them from a private military contractor, and those are usually portrayed as the villains in movies, so what gives? And I guarantee you I've now put more thought into this than the screenwriter/director did, or the companies that produced and distributed this.
For the entire first segment, these Angels are portrayed as giant screw-ups, and this seems counter-productive to maintaining the image of the franchise. For example, Sabina was at the top of a staircase doing surveillance, and then when the action started, suddenly realized that she had to run back down all those stairs, which made her miss a crucial bit of the action. Did she forget to plan for this? Even if she was caught unaware, why not quickly rappel down the open middle of the staircase, or parachute down from the outside of the building? Anything would be quicker than running down 20 flights of stairs. And Jane, when in a car that was being shot at by a car that was chasing her car, decided to stand up and stick half her body out of the sun roof to get a better shot at the car behind her, which exposed her to the bullets being shot in her direction. Seriously? I thought she was supposed to be the smart one?
On the scale of competency and confidence, with James Bond (Daniel Craig) a "10" and Johnny English as a "1", these girls are unfortunately somewhere in the middle, and that's not very inspiring. In fact Johnny English has these girls beat, because although he's quite incompetent, he's got more than enough confidence to get the job done, and the two lead Angels here manage to be both very unconfident AND incompetent in the opening mission. That's a strange choice, unless it was done to suggest that they really needed to work together, and also recruit a third member who would round out their team, which is what happens. Still, even with that in mind, it's an odd narrative choice.
Now, let's talk about "Bosleys". Sure, it's unfortunate that Bill Murray chose not to reprise his role as Bosley in the "Full Throttle" movie. That's his choice, and he got replaced by Bernie Mac, who passed away. It's a terrible turn of events, but I don't think all that justifies turning "Bosley" into some kind of rank, an honorific equivalent to a lieutenant in the organization, something like a team leader for every set of Angels, or someone in charge of recruitment. There are three prominent Bosleys in this film, and I'm not sure I agree with the decision. The more Bosleys they have, the less exclusive the club seems. If everyone's special, then nobody is special. And then this film kicks off with the retirement of the "main Bosley", played by Patrick Stewart, and then they digitally altered still photos of scenes from the other two films to put this Bosley in place of Bill Murray and Bernie Mac's Bosleys. Terrible idea, you can't just re-write the past like that, this isn't a comic-book movie or the final shot of "Return of the Jedi"! If you're going to say there are multiple Bosleys, we all saw which Bosleys worked with Dylan, Natalie and Alex, and it wasn't THAT one!
Regarding gender politics, I think I get where they were going with this one, but the message is very much muddled. If you want to depict famous sports stars as "Angels", or at least people who train the Angels, that's fine. But at some point it just turns into "these are the people we love", and they're all affiliated with this organization somehow. Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a former Angel just doesn't work (though based on that movie "On the Basis of Sex", she had the looks, back in the day) but her time to shine would have been before the 1970's, so that really prevented her from qualifying. Sorry, try again. Besides, as I said above, if every famous woman was once an Angel, then it's not really all that special, is it? This status gets bestowed on female celebrities here in a manner similar to "Men In Black" which suggested that every weird celebrity (Michael Jackson, Elon Musk) is or was an alien. That was funny the first few times, then it just became repetitive.
The previous cinematic Angels did a lot of martial arts, drove racecars, saved the world, and these new Angels shoot guns, like to try on fashions, and swear by kombucha tea and various cheeses - I'm not sure if these are improvements, or just things that are trendy and serve as window dressing. I'm not feeling the feminism, really, or even any political activism at all. If this film really had its finger on the pulse of today's woman, wouldn't the Angels be supportive of new, theoretical, clean energy sources instead of trying to tear down the billionaire's company that's trying to manufacture it? For that matter, shouldn't they be supporting "Black Lives Matter" or gay rights or abortion rights or something, wouldn't that be more meaningful in the long run? OK, so casting Kristen Stewart probably counts as a step toward gay rights, but though this is somewhat alluded to, it's never really followed up on.
Look, women today are complicated creatures, they're forward thinking and competitive, and they want to redefine the power structure and what constitutes "women's work" (like, all the stuff that people used to say only men can do) but sometimes they also want to be vulnerable and sensitive and buy lots of clothes, and that's all right too. Let them run the world, I say, they can probably take it to a better place than the patriarchy has done - plus I'm too tired to be competitive. But multi-faceted characters in movies, that's a different story because it's so easy to let them slip into being contradictory and very all-over-the-place. And then the movie just ends up as a big muddle. We need clearly focused characters with well-defined goals, other than to "spread the love". How does that message even fit into the world of secret agents, or even detectives? How do you stand for the cause of love when you've got high-tech guns in your hands? It's all very confusing.
I just don't think you can take a bunch of action-movie bits that you've seen in other action movies and stick them all together, more or less randomly, and create a viable all-new narrative out of that. The end result is something that doesn't feel organic at all, just incredibly forced and trite, like the last few Connery/Moore Bond films that just kept repeating the same old clichés. When you reboot a franchise with new characters, try adding some new story elements, too.
Also starring Kristen Stewart (last seen in "On the Road"), Naomi Scott (last seen in "Aladdin"), Ella Balinska, Elizabeth Banks (last seen in "The Next Three Days"), Patrick Stewart (last seen in "The Kid Who Would Be King"), Sam Clafin (last seen in "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2"), Jonathan Tucker (also last seen in "The Next Three Days"), Nat Faxon (last seen in "Life of the Party"), Chris Pang (last seen in "Crazy Rich Asians"), Luis Gerardo Mendez (last seen in "Murder Mystery"), Noah Centineo, David Schutter, Hanna Hoekstra, Marie-Lou Seller, the voice of Robert Clotworthy (last heard in "Incredibles 2"), and cameos from Hailee Steinfeld (last seen in "Between Two Ferns: The Movie"), Lili Reinhart (last seen in "Hustlers"), Aly Raisman, Ronda Rousey (last seen in "The Expendables 3", Danica Patrick, Laverne Cox, Michael Strahan (last heard in "Ice Age: Collision Course"), and (redacted). OK, so I want to preserve the one little secret cameo that I thought sort of worked, so sue me.
RATING: 4 out of 10 tins of Altoids
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