Other than human

 

 This review is from the archive. I wrote this for another website in 2000 and offer it here for your enjoyment.

 

There was a moment early in Charlie's Angels when I thought it might be fun. The passengers on the plane are watching a movie titled "T.J. Hooker: The Movie". One of the passengers says "Another cheesy movie from an old TV show". I thought wow; this movie might be hip and ironic, a sardonic self parody in which the actors, helped by a brilliant script lampoon, not only this genre, but their own images as well! One minute, forty-five seconds later I knew I was wrong.

 

Charlie's Angels is a turgid, dull, over-long, slow witted, childish, laconic bore. This film is perfect for those who have had frontal lobotomies.

 

I believe that the people responsible for this mess must be other than human. Even the most slow witted, uneducated human has a better idea of how people behave, think, and move than the beings who made this film.

 

Perhaps this movie was made by a race of somewhat intelligent, extraterrestrial plants who have done a poor job of studying us, and had incomplete information about Earth. I hope I'm correct in this belief; otherwise Darwinism isn't doing its job.

 

What passes for the film's plot is a series of well worn cliches, that just failed to be interesting when they were new, which was roughly five hundred years ago.

 

The Angels (Private Investigators with superhuman strength, speed, and agility, but sub squirrel thinking ability) must first rescue a kidnapped software designer. Then they must find his stolen software. Then they must kill the software designer because, *gasp*, he is really the villain.

 

If you haven't guessed this plot twist roughly fifteen minutes into the film, I pity you.

 

This film was sold on two aspects: FX, and pretty girls. Lets look at those:

 

The FX are lame. We can see the edges. Wire work and "bullett time" effects abound. In The Matrix, these effects were used to describe a computer generated world where the laws of physics could be bent. Here they are used for no apparent reason, other than the belief that if one film with these effects made money, this one will too.

 

So, how about those pretty girls? They are. Lucy Liu (Payback), Drew Barrymore (E.T.), and Cameron Diaz (Being John Malkovitch) are all stunning to look at. They can all act, as well. Unfortunately here they have been given an idiotic script, poorly directed (by "McG", one of those plants I told you about), and edited by monkeys taking time off from accidentally creating the works of Shakespeare and playing with an AVID machine.