Charlie’s Angels (2019)
I’ve never seen the “Charlie’s Angels” TV shows, nor either of the movies from the Oughts, so I don’t have any nostalgia- or rose-colored lenses to see this movie through.
Truly, the major driving factor to me even wanting to see this version was my celebrity crush on Naomi Scott.
From what I understand of this one as the third movie is that it was a soft reboot of ‘movie universe’ as well as continuation of the TV show, the same as “BayWatch” (2017) or “CHiPs” (2017), or any of the other countless old TV shows that have been brought to the silver screen to be returned to the zeitgeist for a modern audience.
For this go-round, we got a whole new everyone with only the most glancing of references to the previous incarnations. The new cast included Jane (Ella Balinska), Elana (Naomi Scott), and Sabina (Kristen Stewart) as the new angels, along with Bosley (Elizabeth Banks), Bosley (Djimon Hounsou), and Bosley (Patrick Stewart) as… Bosley(?), and Discount Ed Helms (Nat Faxon) and Evil Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Jonathan Tucker) as two new villains.
According to Bosley-Banks, “Bosley” was a rank internal to the group, on par with “Lieutenant.” So… sure. Seems like a concept they decided on just for this movie, and I would hazard a guess that “Bosley” was probably a single person in the prior movies/TV show that’s now a role that has been expanded weirdly.
Somehow, also, “Bosley” reports directly to “Charlie,” which feels like a weird rank progression. Since “Charlie” would be the equivalent of “General” (since we’re imagining a rank structure here), you’d want tiered Bosleys, or for there to be other ranks besides “Beginner” and “Top Dog.”
But who knows, I’m not a script-writer.
The movie opened with Bosley-Stewart helping two of the Angels on a mission, then retiring from the Townsend Group - the entity for whom the Angels work - greeted and celebrated by a bunch of other Bosleys. Meanwhile, Elana was explaining to her boss, Discount Ed Helms, that their company’s new physics-breaking MacGuffin invention could also be used as some kind of terrorist super-weapon, because of course it could.
Warnings were ignored, inventions were stolen by an international crime syndicate, and before she knew it, Elana had been commandeered by Jane and Sabina to join the Angels.
Elana, unfortunately, spent a large chunk of her initial character development window screaming from the back seat of an armored Audi during a gun-fight/car-chase. I was greatly disappointed.
The secondary plot to recovering the MacGuffin was that there was a mole inside the Townsend Group, and that mole was actively damaging the missions that the Angels were on.
Unfortunately, the motivations for that character being a turn-coat were stupid. They didn’t make sense in the context of who the Townsend Group were and what the members of said groups stood for, or why this one member was upset enough to turn evil.
But: Plot twist! It wasn’t who you thought it was!
It was actually a really well-done twist that I didn’t see coming. Despite not liking the motivation behind it, the audience-perspective story telling was done quite well and did not telegraph what was coming.
Oh, and Bosley-Hounsou died with little character development and even less aplomb. His entire existence as a character felt like an afterthought.
A few years ago, “Atomic Blonde” (2017) somehow got the unofficial tag-line of being a “female James Bond” movie, despite having very, very little in common with any of the cannon Bond films.
“Charlie’s Angels” (2019), however, did: there was a room full of ridiculous spy hardware, characters analogous to both M and Q, vehicles with weapons that didn’t make sense, high-end vehicle product placement, and attractive leads who spent time on camera being attractive. The only Bond trope that wasn’t included was the aggressive, barely-consensual sex with members of the opposite sex.
Interestingly, there were a few scenes of the Angels having conversations that made me feel a bit uncomfortable; as a socially-aware viewer, I wondered if the things the script had them say were appropriate, or if those comments and jokes would age well. Then I realized: they were exactly the same types of things James Bond would say in a gender-flipped conversation, and yet we take his dialogue as completely acceptable, and with a weirdly blind-eye to his extreme sexism.
It was weird to see that trope flipped on its head, but nice to see it done.
I’d like to note that, frustratingly, this movie only barely passed the Bechtel Test. Despite the main-focus cast being three Angels and Bosley-Banks, so many of the conversations focused on catching Discount Ed Helms or fighting off Evil JGL, and I found myself waiting for the moment when they’d have a conversation that wasn’t attached to a man. Granted, when the villain of your film is a guy, the conversation will ultimately focus on them, but it was still hard to find those moments.
It turns out that when Kristen Stewart isn’t playing a love-sick teenage vampire, she’s actually a pretty good actress. I enjoyed her Sabina character and I wish she’d had more time on screen developing her - I think there was a lot of unused potential there.
There were a couple scenes where the Angels and Bosley-Banks would simply sit around and chat in such a way that it made me think of sitcom women sharing the latest ‘hot gos’ about their lives/husbands/work/etc.: relaxed clothes, no shoes, sitting on couches, drinking mugs of tea. Nothing inherently wrong with any of those things separately, but it seemed odd to include them all together for designated scenes, especially in an action movie.
Speaking of being an action movie: there were gun fights. There was also a scene where someone held a gun at someone else and said “don’t move or I’ll shoot,” and that other person moved yet were not shot for it. I know that movies do this as a plot device, but it’s stupid. The first rule of gun safety is “never aim a gun at something you don’t intend to shoot,” which means that if you’re willing to aim your barrel at another person, pulling the trigger shouldn’t be that much of a leap for the next step, especially if that other person is Evil JGL who is trying to assassinate you and your friends.
And, of course, when there were gunfights, everyone’s aim was absolutely terrible until the one time it had to count, and then it was magically spot-on.
The physical combat choreography was pretty good, and the soundtrack was unimpressive but also not distracting, so overall “good” too.
Just about the entire movie was filmed in Europe, with a majority of it taking place in Turkey. Since the movie didn’t mention any of the following, I’ll take a moment to include some political points to remind the audience that Turkey isn’t some hidden-gem vacation spot:
As the Ottoman Empire, the Turks committed the Armenian Genocide, which modern Turkey refuses to acknowledge to this day.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been using his presidency to actively dismantle the Turkish democratic system to give himself dictatorial powers.
Turkey hates the Kurdish ethnic group and decided to invade North East Syria, which has undone much of the work the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have struggled for over last decade to hunting down and capturing/killing ISIS.
Oh, and China got a weird inject in this too, as boxes of humanitarian aide were delivered to a wildcat NGO. The boxes were filled with English-branded supplies and equipment, yet for some reason were in boxes covered with Chinese text. Also: a recent study of Chinese organ “donations” may reveal that they are, in fact, harvested organs.
Some lobbyists and checkbooks were definitely involved in the production of this film.
Thanks, Hollywood, for your stellar moral high ground.
This was definitely a “girl power” movie. During the end credits, there were a series of scenes of Elana’s Angel training where she met real-life famous women who were teaching her things, as if to show that the powerful women in real-life are all part of Charlie’s Angels squad of femme fatales. It was a cute Easter egg.
Megan and I saw it in theaters, and it was good.
It wasn’t necessarily good enough for me to recommend that you also see it in theaters, but I definitely do think it’s worth a watch when it comes out on Netflix or Redbox.
This is a movie I wouldn’t mind a sequel too, assuming they kept the same cast and writing team.
