"Charlie's Angels" (2019) Movie Review
Who you gonna call? No, it's not Ghostbusters. It's Charlie's Angels. The Townsend Agency is back with all-new recruits and a new trio of Angels ready to save the world. While the TV show will always be the superior version, Elizabeth Banks' film actually does stand on its own feet all-the-while acknowledging and appreciating the trios that came before. That's right, it's not a remake but rather a continuation of the Agency throughout the years. The film references the TV show and the Diaz movies as part of Angel canon. That's something I appreciated because remakes hardly ever work.
The film follows Elena, a systems engineer who discovers that her company is about to market a dangerous technology that's very hackable and would mean the deaths of thousands if not more. The Angels recruit Elena in hopes of stopping the company before the tech can fall into the wrong hands.
The action in the film was sleek and cool, keeping realism and showing the Angels as grounded human beings instead of stunt goddesses. The film did have a Mission: Impossible feel to it in a sense, but never went over-the-top. I actually liked that. It's refreshing to see women as people with high-intensity training instead of having them come off as robots or extreme stunt women. That's something I feel that the Charlie's Angels of every generation has been able to do.
The writing was good; kudos to Elizabeth Banks for writing, directing, and starring. It seemed like she borrowed from other spy films, but, honestly, at this point it's difficult not to. She didn't rip-off anything by any means. She was respectful of what's come before.
The downside was that Kristen Stewart was sadly underused. She was portrayed as a dumb blonde. Not a stereotypical Paris Hilton dumb blonde, mind you, but only slightly better. Kristen performed well with her stunts but her dialogue was just silly at times. The true star of the film was Ella Balinska, who played Jane and was the leader of the team. Her action scenes were spectacular and her take-charge attitude is what kept the film flowing.
The only other downside was the lack of emotion during vital moments. There's only one moment where one of the Angels was in a vulnerable state and even that was played off in a comical fashion.
In conclusion, I was mostly happy with how the new Charlie's Angels turned out. It had a good story with some great chemistry and stayed respectful to earlier generations. I give the film a 3 out of 4.
© 2019 Nathan Jasper