Should the Charlie's Angels movies have been grittier and more serious

[TMC]

At least the first two from the 2000s. To give you some better insight:

But a lot has changed in fifteen years. We have grown up not just with periodic female-centric action movies like The Hunger Games (Lions Gate Entertainment), Sony's Underworld and Resident Evil, Paramount/Viacom Inc's Tomb Raider, Hanna, Weinstein's Kill Bill, and Universal's Salt, but television shows like ABC/Walt Disney's Alias and The CW's Nikita. There is no longer a need to shroud the very concept of Charlie's Angels in a campy, self-satirical blanket of artificiality. Now that doesn't mean the world needs a hyper-violent and gore-drenched Charlie's Angels movie that will depress its audiences while making them ponder the post-9/11 security state or the horrors of the drug war. Although, for the record, I liked the last Miami Vice movie. But that does mean that a new Charlie's Angels film can be at least as serious this go-around as a Mission: Impossible film or a James Bond picture. That makes the Charlie's Angels franchise the rare property that might actually benefit from a slightly darker and/or grittier reboot.

Of course, the pitch may be more comic, maybe even self-satirical in the mold of Sony's 21 Jump Street franchise. And if it's a good movie, that's all well and good. But, I do think the world is ready for a Charlie's Angels film that takes itself a little more seriously, because the world is ready for a female-centric action franchise that doesn't have to apologize for itself. Elizabeth Banks is getting an all-too-rare opportunity here, as will whoever ends up joining the cast. All of the above makes this one franchise reboot I will abstain from complaining about. So for now, I will merely ask who you think should play the title characters this time around? I vote for Kristen Ritter, Constance Wu, and Tessa Thompson, with Anna Kendrick, Paz Vega, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw as the villains, but that's just me.

It’s the signature scene of Charlie’s Angels, which was released 15 years ago today and now stands as a landmark of Y2K excess, cheer, and contradictory politics. The very premise—three awesome female cops employed by the unseen Charlie—would seem to necessarily comment on gender roles, but the new-millennium version of the ’70s TV show mostly came across as unweighted by social concerns. Its director McG Nichol, who’d only made music videos before, slathered on hyperactivity, gloss, and drum-and-bass songs while also not seeming too worried about plot coherence or the optics of objectification; he ended up with the seventh-highest-grossing film of 2000. Watched today, its carefree aura is so distinct, so winning, that it’s hard not to use dubious terms about simpler eras—pick either “pre-9/11” or “pre-social media”—to describe it.

Barrymore co-produced the movie, and her shyly sweet personal vibe seeped through the entire thing; David Edelstein’s Slate review at the time called the film “so, so Drew” and said that “when she leaps into a battle you can see in her eyes that she’s amazed—and thrilled!—to be playing a kung-fu superhero.” This description also mostly applies to Cameron Diaz, whose character is meant to be a brilliant airhead, socially inept but well-read and very fond of disco dancing. Lucy Liu cuts a slight contrast; she’s in black leather a lot, and is the one Angel who airs inner angst, chaffing against the fact that she has to hide her accomplishments from her movie-star boyfriend played by Matt LeBlanc. If you wanted to make the argument that this characterization derives from typecasting—Liu has notoriously been asked to play “dragon ladies” throughout her career—you could find evidence in the scene where she becomes a brusque Japanese masseuse, or to the one where she plays a dominatrix-esque efficiency expert.

Then again, all of the movie’s many instances of dress-up would come across as degrading if the Angels seemed to feel degraded by them. Instead, they grin irrepressibly whether pretending to be Formula One drivers or dirndl-decked singers or other professionals in skin-tight/skin-baring uniforms. A shocking number of scenes revolve around girls creating sexual distractions, licking steering wheels and belly-dancing as helpless male onlookers more or less have steam shoot from their ears. McG’s camera always inhabits those guys’ sightlines and desires—this is a remake of an iconic “jiggle TV” series, after all—but the trio seems to be having a ball seducing men, which is either an example of empowerment or of the kind of porny fantasy that Gone Girl’s “Cool Girl” speech made fun of. Regardless, romantic warfare is just one tool in the Angels’ arsenal. The thrillingly fake Matrix-esque fight scenes telegraph that these women have brawn; a few hard-to-follow sequences involving foreign languages or ornithology expertise are meant to show that they also have very powerful brains.

It’s perhaps regressive to praise the film’s smiling obliviousness, but 15 years later, something about it feels refreshing. Maybe it’s just the total lack of darkness.

Today, the most exciting female action stars are defined by Katniss Everdeen-style seriousness; the most exciting comedy women have Amy Schumer’s self-deprecating edge; even Pitch Perfect and Bridesmaids boast a level of drama and genuine conflict that Charlie’s Angels doesn’t bother with (men now more often get to have pathos-free fun—see 21 Jump Street and Magic Mike XXL for example). Recent reports say that Elizabeth Banks may direct a new Charlie’s Angels, and it’s easy to imagine all the ways she might try to improve upon the 2000 version: more body-type diversity, smarter jokes, filmmaking that doesn’t resemble a string of beer and car commercials. But it’d be heartening if, amid the changes, there was still room for Angels who get to be, for the most part, angelic.

It’s important to remember Charlie’s Angels arrived right in the throes of third-wave feminism, which encouraged women to embrace their sexuality and traditionally feminine traits as a means to reclaim their power. Precious few stars openly identified as feminists. These were the days of “Oops!...I Did It Again” and the dawn of the second Bush era. Showing women saving the day while still balancing in heels and seducing onlookers was, for many at the time, the height of progress.

“Our movie isn’t like G.I. Jane, where they took the femininity away from the woman,” Liu told the Morning Call on the film’s press tour. “We embrace our femininity. My biceps are only this big and my triceps are nonexistent, but I can still do something about it without shaving my head and doing one-arm push-ups…. I’m rock-climbing in four-inch heels! If it were The Matrix, you’d go, What are they doing in those shoes? But we can get away with that because we’re Charlie’s Angels!” (Fast-forward 15 years and Bryce Dallas Howard’s Jurassic World high heels sparked widespread outrage, eventually getting swapped for more sensible dinosaur-dodging boots.)

There are plenty of moments that don’t hold up today. The male gaze is far from subtle. The Angels’ wardrobes are less than practical, often designed to objectify and distract lascivious men long enough to get the job done. A lingering shot on the stitching of the seat of Liu’s jeans as she crawls across a car and multiple scenes of cultural appropriation—a problematic grab bag ranging from the Angels posing as massage therapists in geisha attire while the Vapors’ “Turning Japanese” plays to Barrymore doing brownface as Diaz and Liu belly dance with bindis—are downright uncomfortable to watch.

Ah, the early 2000s. A time of flashy excess. A time when monoculture still existed, and we were all soaked in it. A time when the gritty ironies of ‘90s Gen-Xers became candy-coated and magnified into multi-colored pastiches of bubblegum irony. This new flavor of irony was so sincerely manufactured, it turned a corner and became “real” again. We were having fun, and we knew we were having fun, and we winked loudly about it all along the way. All of these cultural impulses and more coalesced together in two 2000s-defining (for better and for worse) action magnum opuses: Charlie’s Angels (2000) and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003).

There's this upcoming film called The 355, which on the surface, is how I imagined what Charlie's Angels could've been like. I suppose that on its own, The 355 looks like Charlie's Angels mixed with Ocean's 8 and Jason Bourne.