Charlie’s Angels
dir. McG
Columbia Pictures

It’s been a bad year for good movies, but it’s been a great one for guilty pleasures. Bring It On’s scantily clad lessons in class differences, X-Men’s comic book sensibility and Gladiator’s campy nobility have made for great, if not scintillating, entertainment this year. So when the powers that be decided to release an update of "Charlie’s Angels," the ’70s jiggle classic, it seemed destined to join the rest of this year’s high trash.

Unfortunately, this incredulously stupid production, brought to you by nine producers and a reported 32 screenwriters (of which three are credited), is not one of those movies. It should have been the Coyote Ugly of action movies. Instead, it’s just an overcooked vanity project gone horribly awry.

Producer Drew Barrymore stars as Dylan, the badass leader of an elite trio of hot female detectives who work for an unseen father figure named Charlie (the voice of John Forsythe). Charlie assigns Dylan and her cohorts — Natalie (Cameron Diaz) and Alex (the always-awful Lucy Liu) — to rescue kidnapped technology millionaire Eric Knox (Sam Rockwell).

Knox’s partner Vivian Wood (Kelly Lynch) believes the kidnapping is the work of his rival Roger Corwin (Tim Curry), and Charlie happily sends the girls off to rescue the poor geek and find out what Corwin intends to do with stolen technology from Knox.

And so follows an hour and a half of Liu whipping her hair around in slo-mo, Diaz shaking her ass in Spider-Man Underoos and Barrymore pouting at the camera. Bill Murray shows up looking very confused as Bosley, Charlie’s real-world contact, and then not one, but two of Drew Barrymore’s real-life lovers appear in cameos that have little to do with the rest of the movie.

Then there’s a ridiculously predictable plot twist involving Knox, Wood, Marvin Gaye music and Crispin Glover (George McFly in Back to the Future) brandishing a sword, but we shouldn’t complain. The explosions, Matrix-lite action scenes and T&A take more precedence than an intelligent, interesting plot. Silly things like that don’t matter in this movie.

That’s not to say that Charlie’s Angels was ever expected to be, say, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. But apparently asking it to be a girl-power version of X-Men was asking too much.

— Stephanie Kuenn (smkuenn at gmail dot com)