DIRTY ANGELS - Mark Reviews Movies

Dirty Angels, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 12, 2024

Just because an action movie demands violence by way of its basic purpose doesn't mean that every bit of violence is worth showing. Dirty Angels makes us consider that when, during an early scene, a pair of teenage girls are thrown from the roof of their school by terrorists. The act is supposed to be horrifying, obviously, but director Martin Campbell doesn't simply portray it as such. He has his camera follow the first girl from the roof to the ground, only for it to look up and watch as the second teen falls to her death. It's a bit of visual trickery that comes across as showing off, and in this particular context, the move leaves one feeling as disturbed by that attitude as by what we're seeing.

The movie has other moments of intentionally unsettling violence, clearly meant to highlight the severity of its setting—post-war Afghanistan—and the ruthlessness of its villains—a group of ISIS fighters trying to gain power within that country. The backdrop and antagonists here suggest that the filmmakers have intentions that go beyond the stuff of some typical action fare. Then, we meet the shallow characters, get a grasp of the rudimentary plot, and witness a few executions filmed in a way that seems to revel in the bloodshed, and the movie reveals it isn't anything more than a routine actioner. It's also one that often feels as if it is in bad taste.

The opening scene, which has Eva Green's covert operative Jake almost be stoned to death but saved in a military rescue operation, doesn't help much, either. Jake and her team had been captured by ISIS soldiers in the aftermath of the United States' exist from Afghanistan, and the terrorists' leader Amir (George Iskandar) forces her squad mates to throw the first rocks, lest he begin killing innocent locals. As she's being evacuated on the helicopter, the camera looks back to watch Amir shoot each and every member of Jake's team in the head.

Violence itself isn't the issue here, of course. The problem is that it comes across as exploitative—to serve the plot, to give one the broadest sense of horror, to let Campbell display how bloody and showy he can make that violence. There's no higher ambition to the bloodshed, the story, the setting, the characters, or anything else in this movie.

The killing of her team, for example, gives Jake a personal motive to accept the mission to rescue a group of American students whom Amir and his group have kidnapped from an international school in Pakistan. Jake's the generically tough type, who asks no questions and gives no answers, and sure, Green pulls off the role. One wishes her potential action-star breakthrough, though, was in something less questionable than this.

Upon arriving overseas, Jake finds herself at the de facto head of a group of women soldiers, since they'll be more convincing as a phony team of health-care workers once they get inside Afghanistan. In case we haven't gotten a sense of Jake's personality by then, she lets the team know that she doesn't care about names (since they're all aliases, anyway) or histories or anything personal.

She only sees her teammates by their function: "Geek" (Jojo T. Gibbs), "Shooter" (Emily Bruni), "Medic" (Ruby Rose), and explosives expert "the Bomb" (Maria Bakalova). Rocky (Rona-Lee Shimon), the mechanic, gets a pass, apparently, because she told Jake her name before the squad leader could emphasize how unflappably professional she is. The screenplay by Alissa Sullivan Haggis and Jonas McCord seems to stick to Jake's disinterested philosophy, as well, since the characters among the team really do only exist to serve their functions within the plot.

There's almost no point detailing that plot, which has the team trying to gather local weapons and equipment for their mission. Meanwhile, Amir keeps putting on displays of just how villainous he is, while the internal conflict between ISIS and the in-power Taliban mainly exists for almost every Middle Eastern character here to be an outright bad guy, a secret one, or surely capable of becoming one. The two exceptions are brothers Malik (Rez Brojerdi) and Abbas (Aziz Capkurt), the team's drivers, who become easy comic relief and stay that way even in death.

Campbell's a veteran of action moviemaking and for good reason, as some of the sequences here are staged and shot cleanly, competently, and with a sense of coherence. Again, it's not the action of Dirty Angels that's the problem, but the way the movie exploits so much horror and terror for cheap thrills certainly is.

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