Why a Post-#MeToo Charlie’s Angels Failed to Connect With Audiences

When Elizabeth Banks scraped away the franchise’s absurd male gaze, she also got rid of its camp.

The first Charlie’s Angels film opens with LL Cool J (later revealed to be Drew Barrymore in a Scooby-Doo-esque rubber mask) grabbing a bomb-strapped airplane passenger and pulling him out of the plane’s emergency exit. In reality, this would likely the plane would crash and every passenger would die, but this isn’t the real world. This is director McG’s Charlie’s Angels (yes he actually goes by McG). Nothing is plausible and anything goes — and that’s why no reboot can ever touch the originals.

After a dismal opening weekend at the box office, it’s clear that audiences aren’t very interested in a new vision of Charlie’s Angels either. With Elizabeth Banks at the helm (she serves as writer, director, producer, and co-star), this reboot could have been a big hit. However, its commitment to a more realistic, feminist scope removed the playful energy and excitement the franchise is known for.

Let’s be perfectly clear: Charlie’s Angels needed an update. A more respectful, feminist-friendly version of this story is certainly necessary. The original films suffer from gratuitous scenes saturated with the male gaze.

Why does Cameron Diaz have to dance around her room in a pair of men’s briefs, shaking her butt right into the eye of the camera? Why do the Angels’ milkmaid disguises have such low-cut necklines and short hemlines? The Angels aren’t weaponizing their sexuality — these scenes exist solely to titillate male viewers.

The original films also do a poor job handling race. In one scene the Angels disguise themselves in generic kimonos and short black bobs, while in another they belly dance with bindis on their foreheads.

It’s obvious that the franchise needed an update, but 2019’s Charlie’s Angels cannot match the exuberance and playful energy of the originals. While Banks’ reboot does give the film a welcome feminist slant, its commitment to getting everything right deters from the plot and ignores the core principle of the franchise: it has to be fun.

The original television series was created as escapist pulp, and McG’s films are feature-length extensions of that philosophy. Charlie’s Angels and the sequel Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle are brilliant superspy action films that move at hyperspeed. The color saturation is turned up ten notches, the set pieces are huge, and the stunts as endless as the early 2000s celebrity cameos.

The reboot will never be able to touch these original films for five big reasons.

The new cast lacks chemistry:

Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu, and Cameron Diaz have the kind of chemistry as Dylan, Alex, and Natalie that money cannot buy. It’s genuinely thrilling every time they are all on screen together and anytime they are apart, the audience can’t wait for them to reunite. Maybe it’s because you can tell that all three women are really having fun — and how could they not? They’re running around in fun disguises and flying through the air on wires.

Their chemistry can’t be replicated by 2019’s new Angels Kristen Stewart, Naomi Scott, and Ella Balinska. The girls are all individually strong, but their group lacks the lighter than air charisma of the original film’s trio. The reboot spends too much time setting up the team while the originals throw the audience right into the action without sacrificing any of the intimacy and magnetism of the core group’s relationship.

The new villain isn’t campy enough:

In the first Charlie’s Angels film, the Angels are after a stolen technology that can recognize voice patterns and turn any cellphone into a homing device. Sound familiar? Yes, Charlie’s Angels predicted the state of technology in 2019. And the sequel gave us one of the greatest villains in history in the form of Demi Moore’s Madison Lee — an ex-Angel with a chip on her shoulder who, in essence, intends to sell the entirety of the witness protection program. She uses a pair of golden handguns, wears a giant fur coat, and screams “Yahtzee!” as she plots her revenge. She is, quite simply, iconic and incomparable.

The reboot’s conflict and villains are murky at best — the Angels must retrieve a technology that can cause seizures while weeding out a potential mole in their agency. It’s convoluted and not in a good way. While the actual plot is mostly secondary in a Charlie’s Angels film, if it doesn’t make sense it should at least be stuffed with enough fun to keep audiences invested.

The new film has unmemorable action sequences:

Here’s where the original films and the reboot really differ. The action sequences in the new film are formulaic at best. There are the standard chases and hand-to-hand-combat, but similar scenes can be found in far superior recent female-led spy films like Atomic Blonde (2013) and Salt (2010).

The original two Charlie’s Angels films have some of the most incredibly fun, well-made action sequences ever constructed. Barrymore, Diaz, and Liu fly through the air, kicking and punching their way to the end credits. The action scenes often extend over ten minutes and make up most of the films’ runtimes, whereas in the reboot these scenes are over too fast and occur too sparingly. Too much time is spent getting to know the Angels on a backstory that doesn’t contribute much to the overall plot.

In the original films, it felt like everything was taking place between expansive, high-budget fight scenes. The Angels face bad guys at illegal motocross races, derelict shipyards, and dirty bars in remote countries. The new film just doesn’t match the excitement of those scenes and unfortunately contributes to a largely unmemorable reboot.

The new music was a flop (sorry Lana!):

It was always going to be a challenge for the Charlie’s Angels reboot to replicate the success of the original’s soundtrack. The film’s theme song, Destiny’s Child’s “Independent Woman Part 1,” was a massive hit, spending eleven consecutive weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

The reboot’s success could be amplified by a hit on a similar level, so producers enlisted Ariana Grande at the peak of her success to executive produce and contribute new original music to the soundtrack. On paper, there’s no way this couldn’t work. But the soundtrack’s lead single “Don’t Call Me Angel,” a collaboration between Grande, Miley Cyrus, and Lana Del Rey, was a flop.

The song just could not compare to the legendary opening riff’s of Destiny’s Child’s song and quickly drew comparisons between the two, which likely didn’t help rally audiences to the theater.

The new film is too plausible:

McG’s Charlie’s Angels will never be matched simply because they are absolutely absurd. Nothing, and I mean nothing, about the plot is believable — and that is exactly why they are so brilliant.

There are plenty of similar spy films that strive for realism, and if that’s what audiences are looking for then they should look somewhere other than the original Charlie’s Angels films. For instance, in the first film, Cameron Diaz enters a room where an alarm will be triggered if the floor feels pressure for longer than 2.5 seconds. Instead of simply running across the room, she does a full flipping acrobatic routine, just because it looks cooler!

The opening sequence of the sequel sees the Angels driving a semi-truck off the side of a bridge. They don’t just escape the car hurtling through midair, but manage to avoid being hit by debris while falling fast enough to reach a helicopter that is also falling, strapping into it, and flying it up into the air before they hit the water.

It’s that kind of sheer implausibility that makes these films so special and so incredibly fun. The 2019 version throws this approach away almost entirely to aim at a more realistic Charlie’s Angels. The group gets themselves into plenty of trouble, but there’s no unexpected maneuver to their escape. The action and stakes are so low they leave the audience slumped back in their chair instead of on the edge of their seat.

An outing with Charlie’s Angels should be exciting, fun, and completely implausible. The 2019 reboot strives to update the franchise with a modern, respectful screenplay. The optics of the new film may be much stronger than the original, but its failure proves any successful future iterations will need to hearken back more to the brilliance of the original films. That may just be impossible in 2019.

[Article originally published by Taste on November 20, 2019]