Charlie’s Angels
I Love To See You Smile
The showiest smile in Charlie’s Angels belongs to Cameron Diaz. She displays it in one slow-motion hair-flipping scene right out of an old Clairol ad, and it just looks fabulous on her. You can tell that she’s putting all the effort she can into making her smile as sweet and wide and as bright as possible, and it’s just breathtaking. It’s a smile without self-consciousness; she sports it even when she’s doing a horribly awkward dance on — of all places — the set of “Soul Train”. The movie wants us to elieve she’s a Jeopardy! champion (”I’ll take ‘Cameron Diaz Movies’ for $100, Alex!”), which is mostly done for camp value, but she smiles as though she’s just become a five-day champion all throughout the movie.
Drew Barrymore’s smile is not of the same wattage or intensity; it’s a playful and frivolous smile, a teasing, taunting smile. It’s the kind of smile that can herald almost anything, from a kiss on the lips to a kick in the teeth. (Unfortunately, she wastes her best smile of the movie on Tom Green, of all people.) It’s a daring, adventurous smile, suitable for either a very bad girl or a very good girl who enjoys being bad occasionally.
Lucy Liu’s smile is a trifle thin-lipped compared to the other Angels; slower, more thoughtful, more mysterious and evocative. It is a serious, searching, almost challenging smile. It is as though she’s looking right through you, and all you know is that you want to keep that smile on her face, for if it ever goes away, you’re in for it. It’s a cool smile, that can turn icy and dangerous, one that brooks no argument. It’s the smile of a woman who knows what she wants, and how you’re going to get it for her.
The three actresses who inspire such flights of fancy (or sexist drivel, if you insist) appear together in the updated big-screen version of Charlie’s Angels, and together they represent a certain kind of Hollywood temptation that’s all too common nowadays. The temptation is this; take three beautiful young actresses, dress them in tight leather jumpsuits, giant dashikis, beat up T-shirts, polyester business suits and false beards, or whatever else your costume department can dream up, have them drive cool cars and leap around acrobatically and kick Tim Curry and some other bad guys around and generally save the world in an hour and a half. And if you can do all that, well… then…
The movie just sort of writes itself, doesn’t it?
Well, no, it doesn’t.
Charlie’s Angels has a horrible plot with some nice campy touches here and there (the opening credits are the best example). It has some sharp turns of parody, skewering movies like Lethal Weapon and Austin Powers and The Matrix with occasional flair. (The biggest satiric target appears to be John Woo and Mission: Impossible 2, which makes a weird kind of sense if you’re willing to accept the premise that the Charlie’s Angels TV series was a subtle parody of the Mission: Impossible TV series.) But the movie is written as though the plot is just an inconvenience, a distraction from the hypnotic stop-motion movement of Liu, Diaz and Barrymore flying through the air.
It’s probably too much to expect anything like good writing from Charlie’s Angels, in fact, it’s downright pointless. But it ought not to be too much to expect that Bill Murray have a bigger, funnier role in the proceedings as Bosley, and he doesn’t. (The one scene where an imprisoned Bosley throws a baseball up against the wall a’la Steve McQueen in The Great Escape would have been funny if one of the chickens in Chicken Run hadn’t stolen the bit earlier this year.) Murray is occasionally able to transcend truly bad material, but doesn’t manage to do so here. He doesn’t even do enough flirting to get his face slapped, even, which is a shame. (Most of the laughs in the movie don’t come from Murray but from the soundtrack, of all things.)
However, of course, if you decide to rent Charlie’s Angels, you won’t be doing so because of the normal movie-critic reasons. The odds are very good that if you watch the movie, you will come away with a smile on your face. All I’m saying is: don’t expect it to be as big as Cameron Diaz’s smile.