‘Charlie’s Angels’ reboot shows promise.
As a movie, “Charlie’s Angels” has serious problems, but the new Angels trio is promising and shows there’s life yet in the old formula. There’s something going here. It’s just not quite there yet.
First, some history: “Charlie’s Angels” was an hourlong TV show that debuted in 1976 and was an instant sensation. It’s remembered as silly and superficial, but it was really just a police drama with three pretty women in the lead roles.
At the start of the millennium, the Angels came to movies in a pair of terrible action comedies starring Lucy Liu, Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore. And then, apparently, there was a shortlived TV reprise in 2011, which nobody saw, including me. The result of all of this is that there have been many incarnations of Angels trio, even within the original series, which had a succession of cast changes.
So I can tell you, as an expert on all this (I was a teenage boy in the 1970s; of course, I watched the show), that this team of Kristen Stewart, Naomi Scott and Ella Balinska is the best in, oh, say, 42 years. That is, since the second-season TV trio of Cheryl Ladd, Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith, which was, as any connoisseur of classic TV can tell you, was better than the one the year before, with Farrah Fawcett.
What makes this trio so good
— or, at least, potentially so — is that the women are distinct personalities, and each is appealing and interesting in her own right. Sabina (Stewart) is the funniest of the three, an extrovert prone to blurting out whatever she’s thinking, with no filter. Jane (Balinksa) is sensitive, as well as an acrobat who can do anything physical. And Elena (Naomi Scott) is nervous and earnest and a computer expert with a mythic capacity for hacking into everything.
What allows the trio to be so good — or potentially so — is that this incarnation of “Charlie’s Angels” has found the right tone. It doesn’t go for goofy farce, like the other movie series. It’s fairly light, but serious enough to keep the audience engaged in the story. Plus, it has the grounding presence of Elizabeth Banks as the Angels’ boss, Bosley.
Banks also directed and wrote the screenplay, based on a story by Evan Spiliotopoulos and David Auburn. Banks’ direction of the actresses is probably the source of everything good about the movie, but this is Banks’ second feature, and her first action movie. And “Charlie’s Angels” has the problem of most first action movies — too much action.
The screenplay is built as a series of action sequences, with lulls in between. The action sometimes comes in the form of chases, sometimes in the form of fights. The one carryover from the earlier movie version, which should have been left behind, is an emphasis on martial arts. So it’s lots of kicking and chopping, and this starts from the opening minutes.
They didn’t have to do this. They actually have characters here that we can care about, and they have a tone that will support a semiserious story that we would be patient enough to watch. This new “Angels” could actually borrow another page from the original series and have the women go undercover — not merely in disguise — to infiltrate.
Indeed, though the execution is lacking, the actual premise of the new “Angels” is interesting, about a new weapon, disguised as an Alexa or Siri-like device, that could be used to target anyone for assassination. Eventually, after a soporific and repetitive first 60 minutes, the movie’s story starts kicking in. Thus, “Charlie’s Angels” is the rare case of a movie that starts off terrible but ends fairly well.
Still, they can do better. Next time, they probably will.