Movie Night: Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle

Somewhere along the line, you’d think somebody would have noticed that the movie you were making was utter garbage.

Not to say Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle is without its moments. In fact, that’s about all it is: moments. Bernie Mac can’t help but be funny. And Demi Moore not only looks great, but shows that as an actor, she’s head and shoulders above the rest of this bunch (though I’ve already talked about the ridiculous anachronism of naming a woman her age Madison). But what the hell were John Cleese and Bruce Willis doing in this piece of crap? (I guess Bill Murray was the only smart one in the bunch — he passed.)

You know you’re in trouble when the basic premise of your story makes no sense whatsoever. The government has a list of people in the Witness Protection Program, and decides to split the list and encode onto two titanium rings. Um, why? There is no reason on Earth to do something so mindbogglingly stupid. I’m not exactly all that confident in the intelligence of our government, but even I give them more credit than that.

Director McG obviously just sat down, made a list of things he thought were “cool” — helicopters, motocross, sports cars — and then farmed them out to some hack and said, “Figure out a way to string all of these together.” And while he can compose a shot, that’s about as far as his directorial talent extends. I can’t even begin to cover the picture’s sheer stupidity. Helicopters making a cold start in the time it takes to fall off of a dam. People crashing sports cars at a hundred miles an hour and walking away without a scratch. Characters being shot and falling off the roof of the Griffith Observatory, then walking away unscathed. Not to mention the ridiculously impossible (and glaringly obvious) wirework stunts.

Yeah, I know, it’s supposed to be “satire.” But see, the thing is, it’s not. Satire has to actually understand not only what it’s supposed to be mocking, but that it can’t take itself so seriously. This is just self-indulgent tripe. Not that I think anyone out there was planning on sitting through this. Hell, I just sat through it (on HBO) because I’d heard such terrible things about it that — even though I didn’t like the original — I wanted to see if it fell into the “so bad it’s good” category.

Nope. It’s just plain, good old-fashioned bad.