June 27, 2003

“What do you think The Devil is going to look like?  No one is going to be taken in by a guy with a long red pointy tail.  He will be attractive.  He will be nice and helpful.  He will get a job where he influences a great God Fearing nation.  He’ll never do an evil thing.  He’ll never deliberately hurt a living thing.  He’ll just bit by little bit lower our standards where they’re important.  Just a tiny little bit.  Just coax along flash over substance. Just a tiny little bit.”

Welcome to Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. 

I knew two things as I watched this thing, not a film, not a video… not much more than the world’s most expensive home movies made by the jock and the three most popular girls in high school.  Well, maybe junior high.  I knew that I was watching the work of someone without an attention span.  Don’t get me wrong.  I am supportive of the concentrationally challenged.  But I don’t want to catch the disease. I also knew that critics would be giving this thing a pass.

Why did this so enrage me?  

I didn’t like or respect the first Charlie’s Angels movie very much.  But I could see what the attraction was.  Editors put together the broken picture, rebuilding it over and over until it almost made sense.  But all that really mattered was that the three women in the leads were so likeable, so personally compelling, that spending time with them was fun, in and of itself. 

I went into Full Throttle expecting McG and Co. to build on the things that people liked about the first film.  As one reader wrote me after seeing the trailer, he would go see the film just to see how all these disparate parts were brought together.  And here is the answer: They don’t!  More importantly, they don’t want to!  It is apparent in watching this film that there was no interest whatsoever in coherence or character building or interesting amusing dialogue or anything else worth paying money to watch in a movie theater. 

McG essentially delivers 90 minutes of product shots.  And the primary product is ass.  The closest thing to tension in the entire movie is the concern over whether Cameron’s bikini is going to crawl another half inch up her ass crack.  Demi Moore’s most dramatically rich on-screen moment?  Running in slow motion in a tiny black bikini. 

But so what?  It is a terrible, meaningless, shallow, sexist, racist (just watch as Bernie Mac’s eyes pop out when he see a big screen TV… lawdy!!!), childish nothing of a movie that makes Vincent Gallo look modest.  But so what?  Lighten up!  It’s just a movie!

Where do you draw the line?  But it is more than that.  Where do we critics, as champions of the theatrical experience, draw the line? 

The phrase I have heard over and over and over again is “I wasn’t bored.”  And there’s the rub.  They have crafted a movie that demands absolutely no thought and comes at you at such a pace that you never feel a thing.  Roger Ebert, in defending celluloid against the digital onslaught, has spoken about the reverie state of watching a film on celluloid in a theater.  Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle creates a state of hypnosis. 

This movie is the embodiment of the storyline of the failed Josie & The Pussycats movie.  You walk in with your defenses down because you have zero expectations.  The film drills into your brain relentlessly.  You don’t so much experience it as submit to it. 

I don’t want to start the habit of calling out specific critics all the time, but how can these two passages be in the same review?

“Angels is a novelty of sorts: the first mass-market phenomenon that wouldn't cast a reflection if posed before a mirror. And that makes sense. There's something slightly vampiric about the way the movie drains the life fluids of everything that has come before it.”

It “proves to be as cheerfully, enjoyably humid as the first blast of summer light and heat.”

Why is Elvis Mitchell giving this thing a pass?  He sees all the problems.  He attacks it in virtually every paragraph.  Yet…

Ken Turan’s review was more negative – “As insistent as it is skillful — and it is very skillful — it does all it can to pound you into enjoying yourself. The result is rather like being force-fed a meal of your favorite foods by the Terminator.”

And Joe Morgenstern, who seems more and more like a single sane, gentle voice in the movie wilderness – “Unless you want to see "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle" as proof of civilization's decline, and I really don't, you become part of the movie's publicity machine as soon as you start describing it.”

I really don’t either.   But I can’t help it. 

What are the lessons of Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle?  The rich get richer.  The powerful get more power.  The editor is quicker than the eye.

I promise you that you could get a lot of people to pay a lot of money to see Cameron Diaz take a crap on a see-through toilet and then wipe her rear end.  And what would be wrong with that?  People want to see it?  The toilet is beautifully designed.  Cameron is so charming… her joy in passing feces of epic proportions is infectious… and it is just a natural bodily function… hell, it’s educational!  And that new Moby song that goes with it is taka taka! 

Full Throttle is the world’s loudest (way louder than T3) Muzak.  “Emergency water landing, 600 miles an hour: blank faces, calm as Hindu cows.”

Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle is not the end of the world.  It is, ultimately, just a movie.  And it is so unchallenging on any level that the time passes easily.  But I want my compatriots to yell out, “This is not good for you!  We don’t have to be whiny old bastards to tell you the truth!  This is rotting your brain.  Down With Love was trying for something.  The In Laws actually has some funny ideas.   Alex & Emma… well, at least it was sincere.  But you deserve more that this.  You deserve a screenplay.  You deserve an action sequence that makes some remote form of visual sense.  You deserve a minimum of character development.  This is NOT a movie.  Enjoy it if you want to, but don’t believe that it is what film is about… not for two hours… not for a second.  Love Drew. Love Cameron.  Love Lucy.  Be young.  Have fun.  But don’t pretend that this is filmmaking.  Or you will get what you deserve.”

If we, as critics, are going to challenge films that are ambitious to reach higher, why are we so willing to embrace the ethic of having no ambition at all?  Are we so beaten down by our meaninglessness in light of massive ad campaigns that we are only willing to fight over films that struggle? 

My thanks to Jim Brooks, Chuck Palahniuk and Jim Uhls for the quotes.  There will be more column later this morning, including Weekend Guesstimates.

E ME:  Where is the line?

 

The Matrix Reloaded. Reloaded.
Read Part One
Read Part Two