Beware Charlie’s fallen Angels
Exotic locations, action and Kristen Stewart can’t rescue this franchise, writes
Back in those faraway 70s when Charlie’s Angels meant watching Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith and Farrah Fawcett-Majors over Dairylea on toast, the plots had exactly the same kind of highly processed cheesiness as our TV dinners.
But at least there was a degree of integrity about them. This latest twist, the third film in nigh-on 20 years so hardly worthy of the dreaded word “franchise”, feels more like an exercise in box-ticking than a worthwhile cinematic venture.
These new Angels, played by Kristen Stewart and British actresses Ella Balinska and Naomi Scott, are not just racially but also sexually diverse. We’re left in little doubt that Stewart’s character, Sabina, prefers women.
Of course, this is 2019 and diversity is king. Or possibly queen. Or a gender-neutral non-binary royal, if you prefer. But writer-director Elizabeth Banks has plonked her characters into the kind of clichedrenched plot we’ve seen a thousand times before, so it really wouldn’t matter if one of the Angels was also mildly dyslexic with a chronic wheat allergy, the story would still be a bore.
It revolves, or rather wobbles, around an amazing new invention; an energy-generating device not much bigger than a Rubik’s Cube, called Calisto. The brilliant entrepreneur behind it, Alexander Brok (Sam Claflin), appears to have the right humanitarian impulses, although his head of development Peter Fleming (Nat Faxon) is a proper rotter.
You can tell this partly by his wonky teeth, since all those on Angels’ side have smiles you could navigate by on a moonless night.
But more sinister even than his teeth, Fleming is mixed up in a fiendish scheme to weaponise Calisto and sell it to the highest bidder. Luckily, he is rumbled with the help of one of his own scientists, Elena (Scott), who is so pretty she will go on to become an Angel herself.
Incidentally, the solid feminist message of this film stops about a cleavage short of the idea that women who get the better of predatory, arrogant men do not also have to be slim beauties with shiny hair and lovely legs.
Anyway, in desperation, Elena turns for help to Sabina and her new colleague, a former MI6 agent called Jane (Balinska). As in all previous incarnations, the Angels work for a mysterious detective agency run by an unseen cove called Charlie.
You’ll recall from the TV series, if not the 2000 and 2003 films, their handler is always called Bosley. Well, the organisation has now gone fully international, with so many operational Angels that Bosley has become a generic word. Here, the original Bosley, played by Patrick Stewart, is about to shuffle into retirement. So another Bosley, a former Angel played by Banks, supervises the mission to recover Calisto.
That’s probably all you need to know about the plot, except of course at least one person we think is a goodie turns out to be, yes, a baddie.
Oh, and it whizzes round the globe, from Rio to Hamburg to Istanbul to London to LA to Chamonix. As a general rule of thumb, the more earnestly captioned locations a thriller or action movie has, the worse it is. This one has loads.
But Charlie’s Angels is not billed simply as an action-thriller. It’s also a comedy. Which means wisecracks pepper the dialogue, most landing with a dull thud.
Banks made a decent job of directing Pitch Perfect 2 (2015), but here, apart from one genuinely funny riff about Batman and Birdman, the humour falls flat. Also, frankly, some of the acting could be better. Kristen Stewart is as classy as ever, but her venerable namesake Patrick dishes up little more than tired old ham.
The action scenes are slick, and the soundtrack throbs like an extended pop video, but will this film win over a whole new generation of fans already familiar with alpha-females Wonder Woman, Lara Croft, Black Widow and Captain Marvel? I doubt it.
Writer-director Elizabeth Banks has plonked her characters into the kind of cliche-drenched plot we’ve seen a thousand times before.
Brian Viner