Charlie's Angels - A Perfect Storm

you know movies can fail for a whole multitude of reasons sometimes the fundamental premise of the film is so bad that nothing built on it can possibly hope to succeed sometimes it arrives to a storm of divisive marketing and political pandering that instantly turns off everyone who isn't a blue-haired activists on switzer sometimes it features a cast so thoroughly uninteresting that it becomes hard to remember you even saw them on screen sometimes the ego and incompetence of the director causes them to lash out at valid criticism galvanizing people's dislike of both them and their movie and well sometimes it's just [ __ ] but occasionally a movie will manage to do all of these things simultaneously and it's just glorious to watch it's a bit like watching someone throw up piss and soil themselves all at the same time you know you shouldn't look but there's something mesmerizing about such a perfect disaster and so it is with Charlie's Angels a 20-19 reboot of an early 2000s remake of a 1970s TV show that most people either forgot about or never even knew existed written directed produced by and starring Elizabeth Banks a fading actress who basically pushed for this film as her own personal vanity project Charlie's Angels was first announced way back in 2015 it's a sign of Sunnis confidence in the script that it took another three years and multiple rewrites before shooting even began anyway the movie finally stumbled out the gate last week after more than four years of development Jesus the First World War was wrapped up quicker than this thing arriving in cinemas with all the Grace and agility of a fat positivity activist tryna do a cartwheel the movie released two critical reviews that I could best describe as middling and an eight point six million domestic weekend that I could best describe as [ __ ] disastrous with no major territories left to release in the movies on track to lose Sony tens of millions of dollars but how and why did it feel so hard well know that I've subjected myself to it in a virtually empty movie theater I can confidently revealed the answer to this most vexing of questions I do this so you don't have to allow me to regale you with the story of Charlie's Angels so the movie opens with Kristen Stewart mouth breathing her way through what I guess is supposed to be a seductive dinner scene with a smug businessman and it made me laugh because mouth breather does seduction about as well as Leslie Jones does funny anyway straight away the dialogue makes it clear that this is gonna be a girl-power movie big time smug businessman spends the whole scene mansplaining to her about why he's better and why women shouldn't try to do a traditional email jobs but she's like nah we'll be fine because it turns out she's one of Charlie's Angels an elite group of all-female crime fighters who gets sent on missions all over the world so mouth-breather beats up smug businessman and when his boneheaded security guards try to intervene the rest of the Angels show up to take them out pay particular attention to Gigantor here because she's theoretically a character in this film I guess this could probably be called a fight scene but it's basically a bunch of extremely accommodating stuntmen standing around like planks of wood while the girls pretend to hit them one of them even buries her enemy for stealin charity money from disadvantaged women and children because I guess men don't need help from charities ooh anyway so the arrest smug businessman and then Captain Picard shows up to congratulate the Angels on a job well done because I guess that's the kind of thing that has to be done in the middle of an active operation instead of later on when they're getting debriefed nah whatever so this scene neatly establishes the complex and fascinating dynamic and personalities of the main characters mouth-breather is the wild one who likes to party and oh look she has short hair beneath her wig where ever seen this look before Giants are on the other hand is the serious straight-laced one who doesn't like to party holy [ __ ] I feel like I'm about to be crushed by the depth of these characterizations so mouth breather and Giganta go off to party or not respectively and that wraps up our intro flash forward to the following year and Captain Picard has retired because he's like 200 years old no the new Bosley is perceived by that guy from guardians of the galaxy who so that guy from guardians of the galaxy meets with magical scientist lady who worked to develop a magical MacGuffin called Calista that's designed to revolutionize the energy industry because you know attractive women in their mid-twenties are well known for being genius scientific inventors but she's worried because the device has been altered by evil white men to induce fatal seizures in anyone within its area of effect how and why does this happen don't know don't question this stuff just look at the pretty colors in the nice outfits anyway the meeting gets ambushed by evil assassin guy who kills the guy from guardians of the galaxy and leaves magical science lady to drone but then Gigantor saves her and she and mouth-breather take her to Elizabeth Banks who's now the new Bosley she wants proof the evil white man are evil so she tasks mouth-breather and Giganta to break into their headquarters and steal the other MacGuffins before they fall into the wrong hands and magical science lady goes with them because the plot needs it to happen and oh no it looks like evil white man stole the MacGuffins before the angels could steal the MacGuffins watery cow so they go on the hunt and track him down to Istanbul why Istanbul because it looks nice I guess and that's the recurring theme in this film by the way logic and rational thought are secondary to making nice colorful things appear on the screen it looks like evil white man is planning to sell the MacGuffins on the black market using smug businessman as the broker oh yeah he's out of prison now I guess but then evil assassin man shows up and kills evil white man and Elizabeth Banks mysteriously vanishes and that allows smug business men to escape before mouth breather and Gigantor can stop them so they go back to their CFO and mouth breather is all angry because she reckons Elizabeth Banks has been working against them then the police gets blown up and Elizabeth Banks arrives but Captain Picard shoots her and escapes with magical science lady Lin Elizabeth Banks magically comes back to life and explains that Picard was the bad guy all along because he's jealous that he didn't get a promotion or something for what the [ __ ] clearly the patriarchy has to be smashed for this kind of nonsense so mouth breather at Gigantor and Elizabeth Banks tractor and Picard to a party being hosted by the other evil white man but he isn't quite as evil as the first evil white man supercard uses the MacGuffin to try to kill him but then the angel show up to save the day and there's more girl para fight scenes with some very accommodating stuntmen evil assassin guy gets impaled on a hook and then mouth-breather delivers the finishing blow to the patriarchy by knocking out an 80 year old man what's a hero and the movie ends with magical science lady getting recruited into the Angels because why not write those quarters aren't gonna fill themselves you know so that's the plot for Charlie's Angels although to be honest it's less of a plot and more like a paper-thin excuse to get mouth breather and the gang to a bunch of glamorous locations with a sprinkling of dull tensionless uninspired action sequences all of which has been done far more competently in other better movies you know it's kind of weird that Charlie's Angels was marketed as an action comedy because the movies deliberately light on action and the script is about as funny as a lily sing monologue I'm more than just a bisexual woman of color okay it's a complete coincidence that I chose a network whose logo is also the pride flag but soon is also completely incompatible with the source material see the original Charlie's Angels movies understood how ridiculous the premise was and instead of fighting against it they embraced it they were played for a campy laughs and as long as you switched your brain into low pyramid there was a certain goofy fun to be had with them but this movie is a whole different beast yeah there's plenty of dumb wisecracking and failed attempts at witty banter and of course all the jokes are at the expense of the male characters where ever seen this before but deep down it tries to play more like a legit spy movie as if this is the Bourne Identity for women or something no less suck about the characters the first and most obvious problem here is that there's too [ __ ] many of them you can practically feel the script groaning under the weight of trying to support so many players and the result that none of them get the screen time they need to develop and Sulekha ball are even fully formed personalities like everything else in this movie they're pleasing to look at but when you get beyond the shiny facade there's absolutely nothing going on I said before that there's a kind of lowbrow guilty fun to be had with the original movies and a lot of that was done to the screen chemistry between the three stars das Barrymore and Lou were self-aware enough to realize the script was total fluff that wasn't going to demand much from them on the act in front so they were able to just kick back and have fun with it you could tell they enjoyed being together and as a result they were kind of fun to watch but what do we have to work with now mouth breather and Giganta or have all the charisma of two sparring dummies with nothing even approaching on screen warmth and chemistry they look exactly like what they are two complete strangers thrown together and sold to act like friends none of them can fight or do anything particularly physical which makes the accident seems pretty painful to watch when you realize their opponents had to do 90% of the work to make it look even remotely convincing I really hope they paid the stuntmen a bonus for this one because they earned it Elizabeth Banks meanwhile is trying so hard to be the cool elder statesman that she does everything short of winking to the camera she's credited as one of the cool writers in this film which probably explains her excessive amount of screen time not to mention the fact she changes outfits in literally every scene she appears in I actually started to think this was some kind of running joke after a while the end result is an unnecessarily bloated mixture of has-beens and never will be 'he's none of whom seemed to particularly care for each other or the movie they're in even worse none of them have the star kyra needed to save the film remember when Kristen Stewart was a big-name nah me neither she kind of fell ass-backward into the Twilight movies and pretty much everything she's done since then has been a critical and commercial failure yeah Patrick's jurist pretty much a living legend at this point but let's be honest he's hardly a major box-office draw and it's so compounded by a weak and predictable story with all your typical spy film cliches dull action scenes that feel like they were only grudgingly included dialog that tries and fails to be funny and a obvious very abrasive female empowerment message that the strip does everything short of Club you over the head with you know when I think about how this movie was conceived marketed and presented I can't help but wonder who was actually made for it's not like audiences have been clamoring for another Charlie's Angels movie the first two were marginal box office successes at best and they were so completely forgettable that I actually had to look them up to confirm that there were two of them the marketing campaign came across as hostile disrespectful and dismissive towards men making it perfectly clear that the strength of the film's female characters was going to come at the expense of its male ones and it wasn't helped by repeated comments from banks herself that this was a strongly feminist movie because that word always gets are season seats doesn't it the problem with movies based on political agendas like this is that they almost always come across as Bitzer unfunny mean-spirited and generally hostile to their own audience like they've become the writers own personal therapy session for a lifetime of pent-up frustration for example take a look at the gender and ethnicity of the various antagonists in this movie and see if they have anything in common now consider the demographic makeup of the heroic characters and tell me if you notice a bit of a trends it's almost like the movies trying to tell us something the result of all this not so subtle manipulation is a weird over-the-top parody of female empowerment where women are universally smart virtuous incorruptible tough confident outspoken highly skilled at everything and physically unstoppable no this would be perfectly fine if they were balanced out by some halfway decent male characters the problem is the men in this movie are shown as arrogant corrupt jealous selfish insecure weak dumb and unstable just begging to be put in their place by their superior female counterparts just for a moment imagine the reaction online if the genders were flipped now we might not have known how badly this movie would Bob when it released even though I did but Elizabeth Banks certainly did she actually tried to preempt this shitstorm by claiming that men would be sexist if they didn't go see it and it would jeopardize the chance of future female led action movies pack the bags were going on a guilt trip Liz since you apparently don't understand your own industry the drinker is gonna mansplain this one for you and this is gonna blow your mind so buckle up see men generally like seeing strong capable women kicking ass in movies it's exciting and inspiring and to be honest it's also kinda hard less way movies like aliens Terminator and the original Star Wars trilogy have such enduring popularity but one thing men don't like is being disrespected they don't enjoy seeing weak pathetic ineffectual men getting constantly hamstrung upstaged and humiliated by unreasonably perfect over pirate parodies of women that kind of thing feels unbalanced unfair and unrealistic and as a result it doesn't play well for either gender instead of entertaining it becomes irritating and distracting and it generates an atmosphere where men feel annoyed and resentful and women feel uncomfortable and patronized I don't know how many hundreds of millions of dollars Hollywood is gonna flush down the drain on garbage movies like this before they finally wake up to this fact but wake up they must because even the hollow accolades of shield critics and social media activists can't alter that bottom-line profit and loss statement that's the problem with facts you see they don't care about your feelings ultimately then Charlie's Angels is basically a discount version of Ghostbusters 2016 another perfect storm of unnecessary franchise reboot misplaced Hollywood Walk Ness antagonistic and divisive marketing a substandard script played by untalented actors and a prickly agenda obsessed director desperate to avoid responsibility by heap and blame and scorn on the very audience they worked so hard to alienate poetic justice really Charlie's Angels may have failed on a smaller scale than pole fights disaster but filled it has and honestly is anyone really surprised anyway that's all I have for today go away now

Channel: The Critical Drinker

Views: 2,090,837

Keywords: Kristen Stewart, Elizabeth Banks, feminism, review, Patrick Stewart

Id: I95_m35kruw

Length: 15min 23sec (923 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 21 2019