Angels are faltering

Charlie's Angels

10 April 2012

It begins as a harmless flirtation. In a tavern full of Mongolian bad guys Drew Barrymore is engaged in a drinking game (a reference, surely, to the similar scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark). Lucy Liu, meanwhile, unfolds herself from a crate in the basement.

Then there is a knock at the door and in walks Cameron Diaz as a Swedish tourist who has lost her way. It is another Angels rescue mission, and pretty soon they are engaged in the high-tech histrionics of hand-to-hand combat without which no Hollywood blockbuster would be complete.

The sisters are once again doing it for themselves. This is a cause for celebration. Isn't it?

I think not. The sequel to Charlie's Angels is even less of a movie and more of a tease than the first one. Beneath its helter-skelter surface of preposterous stunts, revue-style dance inserts and nudging references to popular culture, there lies a sleazy voyeurism that is closer to pole dancing or female mud wrestling than a genuine cinematic experience.

As an example of the increasingly deviant relationship between-television and movies the film is without peer.

While television descends ever deeper into "reality" (exploiting the same principle of voyeurism as this high-falutin' fantasy), Hollywood is pushing the frontiers of fantasy by adopting, ironically, old TV series of dubious quality.

It is, I confess, momentarily entertaining. But the moment passes quickly and a sense of moral emptiness sets in long before the film has concluded. Rarely have I felt more corrupted by a movie.

Our bimbo task force is summoned by speaker-box and the disembodied voice of John Forsythe to retrieve two rings (yes, folks. It's a ring quest!), which contain encrypted information on everyone in the federal witness protection programme. This, we are informed, makes them extremely desirable to various criminal mobs, from Japanese yakuza to Protestant paramilitary groups such as the O'Grady gang.

Someone is prepared to auction them to the highest bidder and the girls must retrieve them before disaster strikes. Somehow involved in this conspiracy is former Angel Madison Lee (Demi Moore) and the exboyfriend of Drew Barrymore, an Irish psycho called Seamus O'Grady (Justin Theroux).

The singularly named MTV director McQ is in charge, and he employs all the visual gimmickry of his universe.

The movie is constructed not so much of scenes, but of the poses that Charlie's Voguers throw as they preen and pout their way through a series of pop videos.

They play at being stunt motorcyclists, play at being welders, play at being surfers, play at being dancers. It is an ejaculatory fantasy which provides instant gratification without enlightenment.

Worse, it affects a knowingness about pop culture that refers to a wilfully random and utterly meaningless catalogue of films and television series: Indiana Jones, James Bond, Mission: Impossible, The Matrix, CSI, Cape Fear, Flashdance, The Sound of Music.

The result is little more than a series of themed MTV videos strung together to get the girls into (or out of) as many costumes and into as many fights as possible. There are cameos from Bruce Willis, Carrie Fisher, John Cleese (sadly positioned as Lucy Liu's father, whose running gag is that he thinks she is an escort girl) and Jaclyn Smith (from the original TV series) who appears like a ghost in a bar to give a pep talk to Barrymore's faltering Angel.

The argument that this is girls having fun in an arena usually monopolised by boys is risible. The sisters may be doing it for themselves (Barrymore is one of the producers) but all they deliver is a fantasy sex product that would be demeaning if it were not so banal and toothless.

From Diaz's shake-it-all-about booty that suggests "You can look, boys, but if you touch me I'll dropkick you to death", to Liu's oriental Babe appeal, to Barrymore's erstwhile Bad Girl shtick, this is a calculated reinforcement of sexual sterotypes.

Give me the sneering cynicism of Coyote Ugly's bar-room babes, the killer antics of Nikita or any of the Stripper thrillers from Katt Shea any time over this "harmless" fastfood junk for the eyes.

It is critic-proof, of course. And, as the bucks roll in at the box office, the film-makers can congratulate themselves on giving the film-going public what it wants.