I’m convinced that Charlie’s Angels is the perfect movie reboot.
There are films you watch at such an impressionable age that all their flaws fly above your head, while all the things it does right stick with you so long they become a foundational text. Charlie’s Angels is that for me. Even as a child, wearing my VHS into the ground with each obsessive rewatch, I knew it wasn’t faultless — but its splashy action, giddy humor, and Y2K girlbossery spoke to me all the same. Twenty-five years later, I am aware it hasn’t exactly aged gracefully. That its lead trio lean into their objectification with a smile and a wink doesn’t stop Charlie’s Angels from catering to the male gaze, to say nothing of multiple offenses of cultural appropriation.
Still, there’s something undeniable about this film. It’s one that knew what it wanted to be, and executed that to perfection. It also succeeded in updating the pinnacle of 1970s “Jiggle TV” into something slightly more feminist and even more self-aware, and in a sea of bland remakes — including its own, which premiered to little fanfare in 2019 — Charlie’s Angels feels like a miracle of the millennium.
The plot of Charlie’s Angels is a mercifully simple one, but also, not really the point of the movie. Natalie (Cameron Diaz), Dylan (Drew Barrymore), and Alex (Lucy Liu) are private investigators working for the mysterious Charlie — but their job goes way beyond garden-variety surveillance. They’re more like a trio of James Bonds: donning effective (yet sometimes questionable) disguises, collecting sensitive information, taking down bad guys, and protecting vulnerable clients. Their latest assignment sees them performing all of the above for Eric Knox (Sam Rockwell), a software savant whose new voice-recognition software has made him a target for a hostile takeover.
The specifics of this plot, again, are just a means to an end for Charlie’s Angels. Its many twists are better used to justify the Angels’ next undercover mission, and director McG has great fun shooting each with panache and bombast. He set out to make what he, in his director’s commentary, called the “Champagne of movies,” a fizzy feast for the senses that “exploded into the pleasure center of the audience’s brain.” Barrymore deserves as much credit for bringing this reboot to life, though: the actress grew up watching the original series, and fought tooth and nail to update Charlie’s Angels for a new audience.
“It was a big movie for [Sony] at the time,” Barrymore told Elle in 2016. “All they really had at that point was a concept, so we told them what we would want to do, how we would want to cast it, how we see the world, handpicked the director, on and on and on.”
Barrymore pieced together a reel of “about 200 different films” from her personal library, citing everything from Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase’s Foul Play to Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon. The musical numbers (one of the film’s best homages to its predecessor’s ‘70s setting) were inspired by Robert Zemeckis’ debut film, Used Cars, while its bombastic fight sequences were choreographed by a Matrix alum, Hong Kong stuntman Yuen Cheung-yan. Charlie’s Angels is stuffed with tributes and nods to films from every corner of Barrymore’s personal catalogue, yet nothing feels out of place. The film bursts with eclectic, zany personality: premiering at the beginning of the new millennium, it’s very much a product of its time, but it feels more real than the tonally sanitized or overly reverent actioners debuting today.
For all the questionable choices that age the film, Charlie’s Angels was also somewhat ahead of its time. It brought three capable action heroines to the fore years before Angelina Jolie became Tomb Raider or Milla Jovovich starred in Resident Evil — and however heightened their circumstances, it was still easy to believe that the Angels were people first. These were women who valued their friendship as much as their mission to save the world, and yes, who cared whether their crushes liked them back. Charlie’s Angels balanced the desires of real women, the whimsy of young adulthood, with its grim premise. Diaz, Barrymore, and Liu, meanwhile, brought naturalism and emotion to their roles. Their Angels might not be the first on a list of iconic action stars, but it’s hard to imagine the genre as we know it now without their contributions.
