Drop dead gorgeous (7/6/03)
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Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. [McG, 2003.]
From the first moments of the opening scene of this hyperkinetic opus — when, entering a rustic tavern in Mongolia packed with hirsute barbarians clad in skins [you can nearly smell the rancid yak butter], we discover in quick succession Drew Barrymore slamming down shots a la Karen Allen with a fat sweaty guy who’s trying to drink her under the table, Cameron Diaz [affecting an unusually silly Swedish accent] riding a mechanical bull a la Debra Winger, and Lucy Liu engaged in a kung fu dustup a la Keanu in bullet time, and segue nearly at once to a carchase across the top of what appears to be the very dam which provided the springboard for the famous swandive at the beginning of
Goldeneye — a chase which ends, as any student of Bond would expect, when our heroines hurtle off a cliff into empty space and skydive into a passing helicopter — the determination of the authors to ruthlessly plunder the recent history of the cinema is apparent; and, between this introduction and the conclusion — set not simply at the Hollywood premiere of a terrible action movie, but at the Hollywood premiere of the
sequel to a terrible action movie [“Maximum Extreme Two”] — which, its putative star [Matt LeBlanc, in character as Lucy’s boyfriend] boasts cheerfully, is supposed to have chewed up a dozen writers on its way from concept to execution — there pass before our eyes an avalanche of references to, quotations from, and sendups of previous popcorn movies — not excluding, obviously, this franchise itself — accompanied [evidencing not simply the eye but the ear of the erstwhile music video director McG] by a veritable Hit Parade of tunes [accompanied where feasible by dance numbers], and seasoned with an unceasing barrage of dumb gags nearly up to the daunting standard of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker.
Indeed the premise is not very different from that of the
Mad Max movies: rather than a crew of lunatics in colorful costumes careening around the Australian Outback in a variety of absurd vehicles cannibalizing the wreckage of a fallen civilization, we have here a crew of lunatics in colorful costumes careening around greater Los Angeles in a variety of expensive vehicles cannibalizing the tradition of the Hollywood action blockbuster. — The protest that this represents some kind of barbaric ripoff of a priceless cultural heritage is absurd: when the Goths sacked Rome, it might have been a tragedy; but if they’d sacked Las Vegas, it would have been a joke.
And, in fact, this is very very funny: called upon to thwart a scheme to steal some witness protection lists [cf.
MI2] which have been encoded upon titanium rings [why they picked titanium I’m not sure, except that according to some new theorem of Movie Physics — take that, Archimedes — it is supposed to float in champagne], the Angels spring into action, not realizing at first that this caper is merely a diversion perpetrated by puppets whose strings are plucked by Evil Mastermind Demi Moore, former Angel turned to the Dark Side [“I was never good,” she protests, predictably: “I was great”], famed Nobel laureate in astrophysics and bedside astrologer, Girl with the Golden Guns — and, incredibly, thanks to a four hundred thousand dollar total-body makeover [supposed to have included repeated Botox treatments, surgery to finetune the size of her breast implants, liposuction, collagen injections, miscellaneous skin treatments, teeth whitening with porcelain veneers, and the services of a nutritionist, a personal trainer, a yoga instructor, and a kickboxing coach], the most bodacious babe in the whole movie. — It illustrates the technique the authors have perfected to explain that Demi is introduced after a brief sequence in which the Angels, by way of trying to solve a murder, fastforward through an episode of
CSI [hilariously machinegunning television copspeak], reprise the autopsy scene from
Silence of the Lambs, and, finally, discover traces of sex wax on the corpse which [cf.
Point Break] direct them unerringly to the correct beach; where the bikiniclad Ms. Moore emerges from the waves, board in hand, looking like a Botticelli concept for a Beach Boys album cover. — Between this entrance and her final exit [plummeting through a stage trapdoor into the eternal fires in the best tradition of the Damnation of Faust] Ms. Moore finds occasion to peal out in an antique Ferrari and a Shelby Cobra, and our heroines find occasion to impersonate extreme motocross riders, professional wrestlers, monster truck drivers, roller derby girls, disco fools [repeatedly], arcwelders a la Jennifer Beals, strippers, dominatrices, Samurai swordsbabes, and Spiderwomen, and make the acquaintance of a variety of secondary villains, including Drew’s former boyfriend [from her metal period] “Irish mobster” Seamus O’Grady [Justin Theroux, mainly doing De Niro in
Cape Fear but with tattoed knuckles a la Mitchum in
The Night of the Hunter], Drew’s apparent future boyfriend [“you always fall for the bad guy,” they explain to her] the Thin Man from the last installment [Crispin Glover], and Luke Wilson [sort of], who is moving in with Diaz and threatening that those wedding bells may break up that old gang of, uh, theirs.
Meanwhile, in the spirit of ethnic misdirection, John Cleese makes an appearance as Lucy’s father and Bernie Mac [the new Bosley] is introduced as Bill Murray’s brother [the one who plays Clue in the ’Hood.]
I suppose one might object that none of this [save perhaps that scene where veterinarian Diaz presides over a calfbirth] is particularly believable; but does it matter? I’m reminded of a line from
Joe Versus The Volcano: Tom Hanks has arrived in Los Angeles for the first time, and, as Meg Ryan is driving him through the city, she asks him what he thinks of it. “It looks fake,” he says. He thinks about this. “I like it.”
And who am I to quarrel with that. Check this out.
____________A greening comes across the sky (6/23/03)
