Mark Reviews Movies: CHARLIE'S ANGELS (2019)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 14, 2019

Writer/director Elizabeth Banks' Charlie's Angels, a reboot of both the original TV series and the previous two movies from almost two decades ago, is smart to treat its eponymous team of spies as just that—a team of spies. They're women, yes, but that's only a secondary consideration. Having a woman behind the camera certainly means one thing: There aren't blatantly leering shots of our protagonists in between hollow sentiments about how empowering the material is supposed to be.

Here, the empowering thing is that Sabina Wilson (Kristen Stewart), Jane Kano (Ella Balinska), and potential new recruit Elena Houghlin (Naomi Scott) play the spy game and play it well. They're clever, tough, cunning, agile, tough, alluring in that way that any spy worth his or her game has to be, and, in case it isn't clear yet, tough. They have to be really tough for this interpretation of the spy team, because there's a whole lot of fighting to be done.

Banks' decision to make an action movie first is, perhaps, the material's biggest downfall, though. As refreshing as it may be to see three distinct women simply exist as action heroes, nothing more and nothing less, this also means that the characters exist in the service of material that mostly exists to present one action scene after another. The women fight, shoot, drive fast, and fight and shoot some more.

The shame of it is that the casting here is good. We can tell that from the start, with a prologue in which Sabina is seducing a rich guy who has been extorting money from charity. She turns the tables on him without him or his armed guards even noticing, because, as she puts it, it takes an average man seven seconds longer to perceive a woman as a threat, than if the potential threat is another man.

Stewart plays the role—of a formerly spoiled rich kid who got into trouble and then made a career out of getting into trouble—with relish. She has a way of delivering jokes that's just between apathetic and deadpan, meaning she's funny without trying not to be. That's a convoluted explanation, but it makes sense when you're watching her.

As for Balinska's Jane, she's the spy who's really adept in a fistfight or with a gun, which means she doesn't have time for joking. If Sabina is the crafty spy, Jane is the brute force of the team, although Balinska shows some softness around the character's edges.

Meanwhile, Elena is the newcomer, a tech geek who quickly has to learn spy craft (although she also can handle herself in a fight, because, again, that's the movie's central goal) and around whom the plot revolves. She's the lead programmer for a Hamburg company's new handheld, wireless energy generator. The device could revolutionize the world's access to and consumption of energy, but it comes with a significant catch: It can be weaponized and essentially act as an electromagnetic pulse on the human body, leading to permanent brain damage or death.

Elena knows this, and she wants the information to become public before the device is released. Instead, she becomes the target of unknown threats. Sabina, Jane, and a couple of Bosleys (including Banks as the story's main one) have to protect Elena and discover whatever nefarious plot the mysterious villains are hatching.

What follows, of course, is your typical globe-trotting action narrative. Every new location (mostly throughout Europe, although Rio de Janeiro appears in the prologue) provides a new clue but primarily offers a new backdrop for some action.

There's a car chase through the streets of Hamburg, during which we realize that Banks relies on quick cuts as a substitute for momentum, as well as to cover up inconsistencies in geography (A car, having had its tires shot out in one place, suddenly appears out of nowhere to attack the heroes) and the laws of physics (Bodies fly and land where they need to for the scene to keep progressing). The staging doesn't get much better later—during a series of fights at a rock quarry or another one at a fancy party, where the truth (after a few obvious red herrings) is revealed—although a game of cat-and-mouse in an expansive office, with the protagonists dressed the same and confounding the guards, is amusingly clever.

For all of the issues with Charlie's Angels, the cast is game, and Banks' intentions are admirable. Indeed, the filmmaker, making her sophomore feature, may have broken some kind of barrier here. Women can lead an action movie, and that movie can be just as bland, repetitive, and relatively joyless as any actioner starring any given man or team of men.

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