As one decade transitions into another, it often takes several years to determine exactly what that new decade will look and feel like in popular culture. For example, the 1990s as we know them didn't begin until Nirvana came out. Doesn't matter achieved success in January 1992, knocking Michael Jackson off the charts. A lot of the movies and music from 1990 and 1991 are more reminiscent of the 80s than the 90s. Likewise, it took some time before late 90s touchstones like alternative rock, X-Filesand movie star Drew Barrymore has passed into the new millennium. It can be difficult to identify cultural artifacts that are so hyperspecifically associated with these transitional periods. Sometimes, however, a special film comes along to capture the moment. Of all the 2000 films celebrating their 25th anniversary this year, there may be none that is more aptly dedicated to 2000 than Charlie's Angels.
Thanks to the success of 1991 The Addams FamilyMovie studios spent the better part of a decade trying to adapt TV shows from the '60s and '70s into big-screen blockbusters. Many of them were inexplicably uncinematic sitcoms and flopped accordingly, but one big success was the Tom Cruise recast. Mission: Impossible in 1996. The film's box office, as well as a surge in '70s nostalgia, likely helped the new Charlie's Angels was greenlit, although the film itself shows many signs of subsequent production struggles. There are several well-known screenwriters, lots of sprawling set pieces that don't seem connected to each other, and a running time that barely passes 90 minutes before the credits roll, as if fulfilling the multiplex's expectations for the minimum length of a big action spectacle. (It was later reported in more detail that on the set conflict between Lucy Liu and Bill Murray.)
Despite all the production turmoil, the film's greatest strength is that it doesn't take this spectacle particularly seriously. This is clear from its opening sequence, which includes a rare tracking shot that can be described as “smirking” as it ostentatiously glides around the cabin of the plane (wantonly catching a couple about to join the mile-high club), as well as a joke about how the in-flight movie is yet another TV-to-movie hack. From there, the film continues to wink, with the opening credits mimicking a TV opening, quickly explaining the common origins of private detectives Natalie (Cameron Diaz), Dylan (Drew Barrymore) and Alex (Lucy Liu), while cutting to clips from various past adventures that we won't see in the film itself.
Not that the film itself is any more consistent. The plot involves the Angels and their go-between Bosley (Murray) working for an invisible Charlie (John Forsythe voices him on TV) to rescue kidnapped software genius Eric Knox (Sam Rockwell). This turns out to be a ruse to help Knox gain access to the satellite system, which he plans to use to kill Charlie. That the stakes-raising moment involves a plan to kill a faceless character that the audience doesn't care about at all is a sign of the film's self-reflexivity. This will not happen in a world that has real consequences. (“This could mean the end of privacy,” one character intones with hilariously obligatory Y2K seriousness.) Instead, it will take place in a world where Mission: Impossible, Matrixand the Spice Girls are robbed with the same shamelessness. Incredibly convincing masks, wire fus, bullet time, and frequent/sexy costume changes are all wrapped up in a visual style so aggressively color-saturated that it sometimes appears as if its stars are being irradiated with radiation.
The aesthetic will be familiar to anyone who watched MTV in the late '90s. McG, the professional name of director Joseph McGinty, was the latest of the music video makers to cross over into film, having arrived on the scene through his close association with the band Sugar Ray, whose early work he helped produce and write. He continued to direct videos for them, as well as for Korn, The Offspring, Smash Mouth and Barenaked Ladies. Basically, if you've seen a late '90s music video featuring a band driving around the suburbs, prominently featuring patches of bright green grass and an often ostentatious convertible, you've seen a McG video. (Of course, these visual references are not as present in his Korn videos.) This sensibility is replicated almost entirely in Charlie's Angelsalbeit with far fewer fisheye lens heists. McG even simulates the experience of excitedly scrolling through music videos by filling the soundtrack with a barrage of non-stop pop hits. No one-line takeaway from the overplayed hit (“Heaven must be missing an angel,” that sort of thing) is too obvious. No instantly dated piece in the current vogue (the baiting techno track “Smack My Bitch Up” plays every time Crispin Glover's deranged henchman character appears) is too stupid. Naturally, the film ends with the Angels filming their own little music video, lip-syncing to Blink-182's “All the Small Things” over the credits and clips. That's a lot.
However, for this particular material and at this particular time, McG was the man to do it. Charlie's Angels. He's shallow enough to genuinely appreciate everything about the film, from the actors to the aggressive color palette to the okay needles. A reboot 2019 tried to present this work more clearly as a woman's work, and while the Elizabeth Banks-directed version is funny enough, it feels more like a really cheap TV show than a crazy, hyper-pop warp of afternoon memories. Similarly, McG's own sequel with appropriate subtitles. Full throttlesomehow felt insufficient just two and a half years later, in 2003. It's hard to overdo it.
However, being in the context of the year 2000, Charlie's Angels seems almost prophetic, especially regarding the coming rapprochement between optimists and tabloid celebrities. By this point, teen pop had already made a comeback like Backstreet, but the film reflected the culture's growing push toward exploitation disguised as empowerment. It doesn't seem coincidental that it debuted the same year as the Maxim Hot 100. (Lucy Liu came in at No. 17; the trio made the top five together in 2003, which of course had nothing to do with promoting the new sequel.)
McG often handles this kind of winking, pin-up kitsch with a leaden edge. During the dance scene where Diaz makes a surprise and shaky appearance on television. Soul Trainhe asks her boyfriend, Luke Wilson, to helpfully name the names of the dances she performs, in case the audience doesn't notice. (Michael Bay style.) However, the Angels themselves are so endlessly charming that they pull it off. This isn't Diaz's only dance scene; in some of them, she combines the perfect combination of athleticism and believable silliness. (She's mirrored by Sam Rockwell, who introduced his signature footwork here to the cinematic mainstream.) Elsewhere in the corporate heist sequence, Liu appears as a dominatrix-style efficiency expert. After a lengthy diatribe, her abrupt transition from demanding useful ideas to a girlish, head-throwing, hair-twirling “can someone show me?” is Lew's hilarious cartoon manipulation, almost as clever as Bugs Bunny putting on a dress. This is the rare film from a music video director that recreates the fun rather than just the flash of an eye-catching video.
The bright colors and brighter staging can't quite hide the discomfort of the skeletal narrative adapted from the famous “sway“'70s television in which three multi-talented women pledge their undying loyalty to an unseen (and as such, hidden) father, with any good deeds purely incidental. In this sense, the Angels are women without a nation. For better or worse, they lack the sense of patriotic duty that would have helped enliven the early years of the superhero movie boom, and they don't fill that void with deliberately dark espionage for an impossible mission.Ultimately, their various dress-up games don't serve any greater purpose, even nominally; they do it for the sake of some consensual combination of themselves and the audience of oglers. In some ways, this is a much more honest document of the work of a female celebrity in 2000 than almost any other film of the era, not ironic enough for the 90s and not nasty enough for the later 00s; a lot, but maybe that's not entirely true. It's a lot and it's nothing, all at once.
