Charlie's Angels

Fans of the original TV series will know the premise; three young women work together as an elite crime-fighting team, controlled and funded by a millionaire called Charles Townsend. The girls never see their boss, they only hear his voice over a loud-speaking telephone as they await instructions to begin a new assignment. Their immediate boss is John Bosley, played in the film by Bill Murray, and thank God for that, because he's the film's only saving grace as far as the acting goes. There's a scene in which he has a conversation with a little bird, and it's done so naturally you'd think the bird really was his friend.

Of course, the main point of the film is obviously to show off the angels, played by Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu. They are so well trained that they are able to dodge bullets, and fly as though on strings while doing martial arts. These sequences were obviously heavily influenced by The Matrix; there's even a slow-motion bullet with exactly the same turbulence effects. Yawn. The Matrix was a great film but I wish other directors would stop copying it.

Anyway, I digress. The storyline involves the kidnapping of a high-tech wizard who has developed some kind of speech recognition software which, if it fell into the wrong hands, would allow ordinary people to be tracked via their mobile phones. So ridiculous is this idea, that I had to physically restrain myself from laughing out loud in the cinema. As is usual in this kind of film, the computer stuff is totally far-fetched. I wonder when filmmakers are going to wake up and realise that ordinary people now use computers every day, and won't fall so easily for these idiotic stories anymore. While I'm on the subject, there is a sequence in which one of the Angels visits a computer site, and there are rows and rows of 'programmers' sitting in a room like monkeys. Each actor was clearly chosen for his geek-like appearance, and one of them is a dwarf. Is this really how we continue to think of the people that built the Internet and make CGI special effects possible? I don't think so.

On the good side, the special effects in Charlie's Angels are great. There's tons of action, and, mindless though it is, it's entertaining. The film was well-directed, and it's main failing is that it has no substance. Perhaps the original series was similar, but I seem to remember enjoying it. Then again, I was only a teenager at the time. Perhaps the movie is for younger people, in which case they won't notice the finer points such as the fact that Charlie's voice was done by the same actor, and the phone speaker is exactly the same. Even the music is in there.