The trailers for "Charlie's Angels" featured such blatantly sexist gems as full close-ups of Cameron Diaz shaking her itty-bitty butt in an itty-bitty pair of cartoony boy-underwear, Drew Barrymore unzipping her wet-suit revealing miles of dripping wet cleavage and Lucy Liu in what has now become her typecast role as the dominatrix bitch.
Charlie's Angels - PG-13
Starring:
Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu and Bill Murray
Directed by:
McG
Now playing:
Showplace West 12
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Sometimes trailers show more gratuitous material than the movies themselves. This is not the case with "Charlie's Angels." The movie showcased female-oriented fetishes throughout, including but not limited to Liu's crack of the whip, Diaz's turn as a cross-dresser and closeups of feet, breasts, lips, fannies and hair that were too numerous to count.
The title characters used sex as their weapon, their downfall and their saving grace. The movie was oozing with sex without actually showing any of it. But, this is not the big surprise of the movie. The big surprise was how "Charlie's Angels" twisted the sexism around, satirized it and used it to full advantage to make the most thoroughly kick-ass, empowering and fun movie in recent memory.
Diaz, Barrymore and Liu play the newest crop of Angels. The writers (Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts III) ingeniously decided to frame the movie in the same sickeningly sweet and more than a little bit patronizing manner of the original series, giving plenty of material to spoof.
The plot revolves around a kidnapped software mogul (what updates a movie more than a software mogul?) and, more importantly, the brilliant software that was kidnapped along with its creator. The Angels hover around Bosley (the perfectly cast Bill Murray) seeping in his asinine "words of wisdom" like sponges and revere their absentee father figure, Charlie.
But as the movie develops, it becomes incredibly obvious who the real powermongers are. The Angels run the show, rule the roost and save the day, even if they do seem like pre-programmed femmebots. The movie tries to show that it doesn't matter where you stick a woman in the chain of command, the power will always be hers. The Angels use sex as a weapon, and men are dumb enough to fall for it. Although I'm not sure this is the best feminist message in the world, it is empowering (as a woman) to watch the women of the film outsmart (not to mention out-fight) the men in every imaginable way.
With loads of satirical quips, a sumo-wrestling-suit fight scene between Murray and perennial bad-guy Tim Curry, a very white-girl Diaz dance sequence on the set of "Soul Train" and two side-splitting cameo appearances by Tom Green, there is more than enough humor to carry the whimsical nature of the film. Plus, in the end, men won't know it was feminist and women won't feel it was sexist. The movie is almost as perfect as its stars' physiques.
