Karate kicks, cleavage, mane-tossing and mayhem haven't impressed the serious film critics, but American teenagers who weren't born when flairs and platform shoes were in fashion have made this revival an instant box office hit. Take a camp 1976 TV series, mix it with the surreal martial arts style of The Matrix, add a dose of female machismo et voila, you have the hit of 2000: Charlie's Angels, dedicated to the belief that men are idiots who think with their pants. Scratch that. Don't even think about thinking. This film is Mission Impossible without the mission. Want to see Cameron Diaz dressed in her underwear, wiggling her bottom in your face to a 1970s disco track? You've got it.
Want to see Lucy Liu (from Ally McBeal) dressed as a geisha giving an "oriental" foot massage to a fat, middle-aged creep? It's done.
Want to see Drew Barrymore beating up seven men (or was it eight?) while tied to a chair - in slow motion? Say no more. Want to see gigantic, orgasmic, red-hot explosions from which Cameron (Natalie), Lucy (Alex) and Drew (Dylan) emerge without as much as a lipstick smudge? All you have to do is think it.
Just in time for the revival of 1970s chic, Charlie's Angels is a Bond movie where the sexy girls get the upper hand. Not only do they use their bodies to lure and destroy men, but they enjoy it while they're doing it. And they win. There's no Bond pinning one of them to the bed as he prepares to shake and not stir them. No, sirree. This is a guilt-free zone, girls. The women are Bond - trampling men like grapes in a winery. Give a woman with a great body the power to destroy the enemy (the male) and she'll do it without getting her hair mussed. To be fair, one does not go to see Charlie's Angels expecting subtlety. Charlie's Angels is impossible to dumb down - since it was one of the dumbest programmes ever made - so producer Drew Barrymore has done the opposite: she's dumbed it up. The film is so camp, so over-the-top, so in-your-face-sexy that you have to laugh.
Charlie's Angels 1976 was based on the ridiculous premise that three beautiful young women could be gun-toting crimefighters. Charlie's Angels 2000 is based on the ridiculous premise that three beautiful young women could be super-hero crimefighters whose martial arts skills are so supreme that they don't need guns (actually, they don't have guns because Cameron Diaz refused to appear in the film otherwise). To show you how ridiculous Charlie's Angels 2000 is, all three original angels refused to appear in cameo roles. Seeing women being blood-chillingly violent remains - nearly a quarter of a century later - shocking enough to be funny. Seeing them kick in men's heads while also looking like sexpots is even funnier. The whole exercise is demeaning in the extreme.
What could Drew Barrymore, who produced the film, have been thinking of? Is this what we thought would happen when women finally got some control in the film business?
Where are the healthy female role models? Where is the new Meryl Streep, emoting madly while looking patricianly seductive? Where's the allegory of women's struggle for equality, their yearning for intimacy, their desire for a good hot dinner? Anything? Above all, where's the script? (One of the dozen or so writers assigned to the task took it home, where his dog ate it, apparently.)
Described as "eye candy for the blind" by Roger Ebert, a first-rank US critic (let's assume he means aesthetically blind, otherwise we shall stumble into irreversible political incorrectness), Charlie's Angels is every card-carrying feminist's worst nightmare. A diatribe on the belief that the only way women can gain power over men is to be so mind-numbingly attractive that the men lose their concentration.
Is real life like that? I don't think so. But then again, maybe I haven't been playing by the rules.
For you Charlie's Angels trivia lovers out there: Cameron/Natalie is the naive one (Farah Fawcett/Jill? Probably). Lucy/Alex is the smart/sophisticated one (Jaclyn Smith/ Sabrina? undoubtedly) and Drew/Dylan is the rebel (with no similarity to Kate Jackson/Kelly whatsoever). These three women are controlled and sent on impossible missions by a disembodied male voice - that of John Forsythe who, having played Charlie in the original Charlie's Angels went on to star in Dynasty. In that TV soap he was, as Blake Carrington, a disembodied body controlled by the sexy, scheming Alexis Carrington (Joan Collins). .
Judging by the success of Charlie's Angels, a camp movie remake of Dynasty is only a matter of time.
Back to the plot: Drew, Cameron and Lucy have been busily defending their film against the Hollywood elite, who have accused them of selling out. Lucy Liu doesn't understand why her Asian audience doesn't appreciate her stereotypical role as a geisha girl/kung fu expert. She says: "I think that only people who have a very narrow sense of self and culture will think I'm playing a stereotype by being a kung fu expert. How come you can't turn it around and say, `Wow, it's so refreshing to have an Asian-American be an Angel?' Why think the glass is half empty? The other Angels aren't Asian, and they're doing kung fu - how come they're allowed? Why do I have to be questioned? Anyone who asks that question should get out of the stone ages." Cameron Diaz reveals that the film was good for her figure: "You want to do the best you can, make the martial arts master proud, accomplish something, and also build new muscle mass by the time that you're 27, so that when you're 37 you'll still have that muscle and it won't be so hard to stay in shape as you get older." Drew Barrymore has been defending herself against the accusation that she has undermined all women in the film business forever by giving men what they want to see: "We are equalists. Women will hopefully watch and think, `I want to be an Angel', and men will watch and think, `Hey, I want to be with that girl'." Honestly, "I want to be angel" was not my first thought leaving the cinema. And the male film critics around me at the preview appeared to be rousing themselves from torpor as the film ended, rather than shouting "Hey, I want to be with that girl!"
Then again, maybe I'm being unfair. Maybe this is what teenage girls want - to be invincible fighters, to be invulnerable, to win the sex-war hands down every time. If so, Drew Barrymore is giving them their fantasy. What effect will this have on humanity? None, I hope. Although an interesting psychological research study was done on teenage girls who watched the original TV series of Charlie's Angels. The study found that girls who watched Charlie's Angels were considerably more violent in later life than girls who didn't watch it. So, perhaps, the film is giving women permission to beat up men.
Imagine the outcry if the tables were turned and a film was made about sexy, irresistible men seducing evil women whom they reduced to pulp in scene after scene. You don't have to imagine it, because there have been lots of films like that and they were box office hits.
Charlie's Angels turns the tables and lets women play the men's game. Like Lara Croft, the heroines eat men for breakfast. If this is the new face of feminism, Drew Barrymore can have it. I prefer to think that Charlie's Angels is ironic feminism, in other words, women will never be equal so let's just have fun with the notion of what would happen if they were. That such a message is coming from young women, is depressing.
Then again, the teenagers who are enjoying Charlie's Angels would have no time for such a view. They would think that I am being altogether too serious about a fun film. And maybe I am. Perhaps Charlie's Angels is so dumb, that one cannot write an intelligent word about it.