The original Charlie’s Angels film released in 2000 was surprisingly fresh and funky. With its tongue firmly in cheek, the film had real fun with the notion that three beautiful ladies could use every feminine trick in the book to fight crime.
And yes, this mostly involved shaking ass and thrusting cleavage in order to outsmart the dumb one-track minded bad guys.
But Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle seems to have forgotten the original brief, and this time when the gals are shaking ass, they are shaking ass strictly to titillate the boys in the audience.
With Drew in the production seat once again it’s a surprise that this time the girls come off looking, well, a tad silly.
Cameron Diaz does her not-so-fresh little girl routine and Drew flounders around in her tomboy stereotype.
There is even an attempt to flesh out Lucy Liu’s character with the introduction of John Cleese as her father (whose idea was that?), but this only amounts to a woeful running gag where Cleese mistakenly thinks Liu is a hooker.
And talking of jokes, the ones on offer here, to coin a phrase, suck!
You can almost imagine Drew and her buddies laughing their asses off in a script meeting at an overlong pun session based around the name Helen Zas.
Yeah, think about it a moment, and then wonder why a film that has millions of dollars on screen in the flashy showpieces is making do with $2 jokes.
Its not all bad news, the odd wire-fight sequence still perks up proceedings and the girls are once again flying around the screen in nicely-orchestrated chop-socky sessions.
Hey, we even get to see a still fantastic-looking Demi Moore kicking ass and showing off her ‘new’ body.
But you can almost smell the dust coming off the Prodigy tracks used to pump up these scenes, making us think that perhaps Drew should buy some new records.
Bill Murray is missing as Bosley this time, he was ‘difficult’ on set on the first movie apparently and he never got fully into gear anyway, so the role has gone to American comic, Bernie Mac.
It’s never clearly explained why there is a new Bosley, and because of this maybe an opportunity for some strong jokes is missed, but Mac has one problem in this role, he just isn’t funny.
Pretty much unknown to UK audiences, you almost expect a tumbleweed to roll across the screen after one of his unfathomable ‘gags’.
Maybe the Yanks got it, we certainly didn’t.
So, what are you left with?
Perhaps a headache from the almost impossibly loud soundtrack, and definitely eyestrain from the flashing bright colours on screen.
But above all you are left with a sense of disappointment at how far short Full Throttle falls compared with the first fun instalment.
