Charlie's Angels belongs to the same class of comedy as this year's The Hustle, Men in Black International, and Stuber — middling and messy but intermittently funny, good enough for passing some time on a plane, but not nearly good enough to be worth getting out of the house for.
Still, it does have one thing going for it that the others didn't, and that is Kristen Stewart as we've never seen her before. The actor who's built a career playing somber, sensitive souls is given a rare (for her) opportunity to play funny, and what she comes back with is an intriguing mix of flirty, goofy, and awkward.
Stewart may not be a natural comedian, exactly, but somehow that only makes her more interesting.
She may not be a natural comedian, exactly, but somehow that only makes her more interesting — first because it's unusual to see Stewart get silly, and then because you never know when she might do something else outrageous or adorable. When she's making wry faces at her co-stars or rambling adorably, she's funny enough to make you wonder where this side of Stewart has been hiding all these years.
Otherwise, the movie around Stewart is only hit-or-miss. A relentlessly sunny tone makes Charlie's Angels hard to hate — it's hard to feel too grumpy when everyone involved looks like they're having so much fun, and especially when "everyone" includes faves like Patrick Stewart and Noah Centineo. But Elizabeth Banks, who wrote and directed and co-stars as Bosley, demonstrates a shaky grasp of pacing, which frequently makes Charlie's Angels feel draggier than it should, and no particular knack for filming action scenes, of which Charlie's Angels has many.
The story involves Angels Sabina (Stewart) and Jane (Ella Balinska) trying to protect a corporate whistleblower, Elena (Naomi Scott), but the plot is so nonsensical that the only way to make heads or tails of it is to assume large swaths of it were reworked in editing and reshoots. Likewise, any emotional arcs are so underplayed as to be hardly worth mentioning. All three leads are likable enough, but never asked to be much more than that.
Image: Nadja Klier / Sony Pictures
Charlie's Angels does seem to have a strong idea of what it wants to be, which is feminist in a you-go-girl kind of way. The way it goes about this, though, is often so obvious as to feel borderline condescending. You can practically hear the "Am I right, ladies?" after a minor male character tells Elena to smile, or after Bosley quips that all women are always hungry. You know, because of socially mandated beauty standards and stuff.
More successful in conveying these notions are the film's fashion sense, which seems to have been chosen with a female perspective in mind. The costumes by Kym Barrett look like outfits these women might have chosen for themselves, rather than ones imposed upon them for the benefit of an imagined straight young male audience — still sexy and aspirational, but with more emphasis on personal style and less on undulating body parts.
They reflect a depth of character that the rest of Charlie's Angels could have used more of. What is more empowering, after all, than treating women as individuals? Certainly not reducing them to vehicles for easy girl-power messaging, as this movie does. At least Stewart's irrepressible charisma makes it out unharmed — hopefully to resurface someday in some other, better comedy.
