Review – Charlie’s Angels

Charlie’s Angels – ABC – 8:00/7:00pm Thursday – USA

Part of the joy of Fall TV Season comes from not just discovering new shows to love and cherish but from stumbling across those colossal failures that are so gloriously stupid that all you can do is sit back and laugh at the show. For Fall 2011 Charlie’s Angels is that show. As we’re well aware by this point remakes are the new ‘original ideas’ and if something was a success once before logic dictates that it will be a success again, and so the film and television landscape is littered with already recognizable titles just waiting to remind you of something you would have otherwise forgotten about. Charlie’s Angels is a remake of the 70s series about three beautiful women who fight crime. Thanks to the magic of television this new Charlie’s Angels somehow manages to create a show that is possibly even more cheesy and thick-headed than the one produced 35 years ago.

Charlie’s Angels stars a trio of attractive actresses of questionable talent. Annie Ilonzeh plays Kate, a former police detective turned dirty cop turned Angel, who by the look of her must have attended police academy instead of high school. Rachael Taylor plays Abby, a Park Avenue princess turned thief who is stuck with all of the ‘sassy’ one-liners which are almost unbelievably groan worthy. The third member was Gloria, but when Gloria is killed by a car bomb in steps Eve played by Minka Kelly. Eve was in prison for manslaughter after she stole an expensive car and took it for a joy ride that ended badly, she also grew up in an orphanage in South America, and yes, she’s still played by Minka Kelly so to answer your question: yes, all of those fun facts about her are as implausible as they seem. The girls are joined by the disembodied voice of Charlie, and are followed around by Bosley and his magical iPad, because this is 2011 and all international super-hackers carry iPads.

Charlie’s Angels is a brainless mess from start to finish. Every second scene looks as though it’s the start of an opening credits sequence that never arrives. The acting ranges from below-average (Ilonzeh) to laughable (Taylor) with Minka Kelly giving a typical Minka Kelly performance in between those two. The dialogue is incredibly heavy-handed and endlessly worthy of derisive snickering. Here’s one example: in this scene Kate and Abby have rescued a kidnapped girl.

Kidnapped Girl: You don’t look like cops.

Kate: We’re not.

Abby: We’re Angels.

They say this even though that’s only going to confuse the girl more.

After Gloria is killed in a car bomb Abby says “I never thought my heart could hurt this much.” Naturally they want revenge on the perpetrators of the crime that like, totally, hurt Abby’s heart a whole bunch.

Kate: We’re gonna find out who did this.

Abby: If it’s the last thing we do.

There’s retro, and then there’s retarded, and Charlie’s Angels is the latter. There’s no tongue-in-cheek look how stupid all of these things we’re saying are. This show takes things reasonably seriously, or at least as seriously as a show about sexy girls fighting crime using the age old technique of kicking a lot of guys in the head can take things. Every scene that takes place is somehow more far-fetched than the one before it. The Angels attend a Heaven & Hell party where they go dressed as devils, because you see, they are Angels, and… never mind. Their plan is to drug a woman by getting her to eat a hors d’oeuvre, but after the target walks straight past the plate they’re forced to go to ‘Plan B’. So Plan A was ‘hope that she’s hungry’?

When the Angels are searching Gloria’s apartment looking for where she’d hide something Kate stumbles across a kitty litter tray.

Kate: Since when did Gloria have a cat?

Abby: She didn’t.

Eve: She’s allergic.

Kate: Then why does she have a kitty litter box?

If you combined these three minds you still wouldn’t have half a brain. Every thought that pops into their otherwise completely empty heads is spoken out loud. Every opportunity to make a laboured pun about being Angels these girls take it. When Kate says “We don’t exactly play by the rules either.” You can guarantee Abby will follow it up with “Yeah, we’re Angels not saints.” And nobody will tell her to shut up. Abby ends most of her conversations in this manner; it’s like a tick for her. Her brain is just wired to say cheesy nonsense like “this Angel might have to spread her wings” or “I think it’s time these Angels get a real taste of Heaven” or “what do you mean somebody kidnapped the Los Angeles Angels baseball team? Looks like those Angels are going to need help from some other Angels, by which I mean us, because we’re also known as Angels.”

Charlie’s Angels is a spectacularly stupid show. This is the worst new drama series of this Fall TV Season by a long shot. There have been a run of mediocre shows but none of them have been this laugh-out-loud terrible. None of those other shows featured a scene where the Angels need information off a woman, so they convince her she’s in a plane being taken somewhere she doesn’t want to go – but in reality the plane is just in a hanger, and they set up a wind machine outside the window to make it look like they were flying. Seriously, that was the quickest and most cost-effective way they could think of to get information out of her. Charlie’s Angels is the best kind of bad show, a show so awful that its complete hopelessness makes it absolute joy to watch because you will laugh the whole way through.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Ugly