McG 2000 USA
Starring: Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, Lucy Liu, Bill Murray, Sam Rockwell, Kelly Lynch, Crispin Glover, Tim Curry, LL Cool J, Tom Green, Matt LeBlanc, Luke Wilson
One criticism I've received before, and again since I restarted this blog, is that I only seem to write about deeply serious foreign films, the international and the intellectual, on the whole movies that are rarely ever that accessible. It's never been an intentional choice but, to be honest, it's a thought that has occurred to me more than once in the past as well. So, with that in mind, I have a confession to make: I really like Charlie's Angels. Not the late 70's TV series (I was always more of a Dukes Of Hazzard guy) or the fucking dreadful 2011 seven episode reboot (the eighth never aired) but the gloriously wacky, Drew Barrymore backed 2000 film with Barrymore herself starring alongside Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu. Bill Murray was Bosley. Much of the success has to be attributed to Barrymore and director McG's smarts in making the film with the same sort of spirit the producers of the later entries in the Fast And The Furious franchise would employ, realising that many of their action sequences were patently ridiculous while others, such as the opening moments with LL Cool J diving from an aeroplane, wrestling a bomb-toting scumbag in mid air and ripping his face off to reveal Barrymore's Dylan in disguise, were mind-bogglingly impossible, and treating them as pure entertainment, there for the audience to revel in rather than pick apart. As such the in-flight movie during the aforementioned scene is TJ Hooker, with J commenting "Oh great, another rip-off of an old TV show", and the cast never take themselves too seriously, or seriously at all in fact. For his part McG cuts fast, spins images, zooms in and out, plays musical cues before abandoning them seconds later and generally seems to having a ball. At one point he frames a fight in the wuxia style traditional of Chinese martial-arts films with strains of The Prodigy's Smack My Bitch Up. Incidentally the word 'bitch' keeps cropping up but is frequently used as a mark of pride for the three leads, as if they're trying (albeit unsuccessfully) to reclaim it from its current derogatory connotations. Repeated arse shots also appear to be ironic, as if the protagonists are calling out mainstream Hollywood for their sexualisation of women. In another scene McG gives us a momentary shot of Barrymore dressed as Harry Potter in the school library at Hogwarts, a tantalising glimpse I'd personally like to see developed into a full project. His style may be hyperactive but it's so bristling with enthusiasm, ideas and pure silly exuberance that you can't help but enjoy the journey even if you suspect you could grow sick of his company very quickly in real life. Thankfully he also makes the heroines more than just faultless feminist conquerors and their personalities believable but flawed. As such Dylan is shown using bizarre fisherman Chad (Barrymore's annoying, then-popular then-boyfriend Tom Green) for sex, dismissing him with a smile as he cooks her breakfast then calling him again when she needs his boat before leaving him crestfallen for a second time. It's a pleasingly sly mirroring of James Bond's typically thoughtless extracurricular activities and Chad himself is portrayed as a perpetually bordering-on-a-different-wavelength comedy character but, even when Dylan is later fooled, used and defenestrated by a preening billionaire (Sam Rockwell hamming it up something rotten) she never apologises for her lack of regard for him, the echo left unspoken and, apparently for her, unrealised. Similarly when Bosley tells the Angels to remember the pseudonym he's using for a mission, JD, Dylan suggests Jack Daniels and juvenile delinquent as cues, a signal of the rock 'n' roll bad girl she's already been shown to be, but later it's revealed that she's mad keen on Scrabble, taking her from a mere fantasy figure to a credibly swirling, dissonant persona. In the same scene Liu's Alex proposes jelly doughnut or John DeLorean, at once an indication of her gentleness, her ambitious dreamy nature and her love of chaotic, flashy speed. Unfortunately the all-male writing team, Ryan Rowe, Ed Solomon (the son-in-law of John Cleese and co-creator of Bill And Ted) and John August haven't afforded Diaz's Natalie the same courtesy. As we're introduced to her she leaps from her bed and from a dream where she's dancing and starts pulling shapes in Spiderman underwear that plays up her childishness. Spidey's grabby pose and the innuendo that follows however implies that she's also hot-to-trot with the first extra at the first opportunity. She's the virgin/whore dichotomy in a pair of colourful knickers. Sadly, not only does her partial naivety not gel with the Angels' knowledge and use of their desirability to manipulate and control men throughout the film, it also means that Natalie is immediately defined purely via her role as a figure of male sexual fantasy. Still, this is in the end just a blemish on an otherwise wonderful production, not necessarily a forgivable one, but one that doesn't stop me enjoying the film tremendously for what it is. Sometimes cinema doesn't need to be anything more.