Will Charlie’s Angels 2.0 fall before they even fly?

trailer review

Hollywood really seems to have taken the 3R’s of conservation – reduce, reuse, recycle – to heart and has been busy reducing creativity, reusing plots, and recycling projects through its plethora of remakes, reboots, and revisits.

Clearly everything must return to the screen in one form or another, which must be why we are now getting another Charlie’s Angels film.

The standalone sequel sees a new cast pick up the crime-fighting baton as the newest recruits of the crime fighting agency headed by the unseen Charlie Townsend.

The current set of Angels includes fierce spy Sabina (Kristen Stewart), brainy former MI6 agent Jane (Ella Balinska), and Elena (Naomi Scott), a programmer who has helped develop a product that could revolutionize the power industry but that could also be weaponized.

Bosley has now been turned into a rank, and the film’s director Elizabeth Banks as well as actors Patrick Stewart and Djimon Hounsou all appear under this moniker.

The trailer doesn’t go into precise detail about the film’s exact plot, but does promise a fair amount of action, mostly while the ladies don different disguises.

It is, however, a little hard to muster enthusiasm for yet another revisit to a familiar franchise. Charlie’s Angels started with a successful television series in the 1970s before heading to the big screen in the early 2000s for two feature films. An attempt to reboot the television show in 2011 (starring Annie Ilonzeh, Minka Kelly, and Rachael Taylor) pretty much crashed and burned. So will this movie revisit fare any better?

The cast that originated the Angels – Farrah Fawcett, Kate Jackson, and Jaclyn Smith – are iconic, while the leading ladies in the previous films – Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, and Lucy Liu – had bundles of comedic talent and oodles of charm. It remains to be seen how well the new cast does, but based on the trailer, it doesn’t look like they have the same level of star power or charisma as their predecessors.

Possibly to generate some more excitement for this reboot, pop stars Ariana Grande, Miley Cyrus, and Lana Del Rey have been enlisted to perform a track for the film, which will presumably be the equivalent of Destiny’s Child’s hit ‘Independent Women’ that led the soundtrack of the 2000 film.

Ultimately, it’s pretty unlikely that yet another version of Charlie’s Angels will bring anything ground-breaking to cinema. But then again, the previous instalments, though enjoyable, weren’t exactly high art either, and we can hope that this reinvigoration of the franchise will at least deliver some entertainment value. 

Charlie’s Angels is slated to be released on November 15, 2019.

- Sameen Amer

The Express Tribune Blog - 4th July, 2019 *