“Get some action,” the tagline for Charlie’s Angels reads, and the 2000 film runs on that pitch. McG directs in his feature-film debut, from a script by Ryan Rowe, Ed Solomon and John August. It runs 98 minutes. It is the first installment in the Charlie’s Angels film series and a continuation of the television series created by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts. The film features more comic elements than the original series.
Trailer, via Sony Pics at Home.
Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu
The leads are Natalie Cook (Cameron Diaz), Dylan Sanders (Drew Barrymore) and Alex Munday (Lucy Liu), private investigators in Los Angeles for the unseen millionaire Charlie Townsend. John Forsythe reprises his role as Charlie’s voice from the original series. Bill Murray plays Bosley, taking over from David Doyle.
Charlie assigns the Angels to find Eric Knox (Sam Rockwell), a software genius behind a revolutionary voice-recognition system and the head of Knox Enterprises. He is believed kidnapped by Roger Corwin (Tim Curry), who runs the communications-satellite company Redstar. The Angels infiltrate a Corwin party and spot a man they had seen in surveillance video of the kidnapping.
“Get some action.”
They call him the Thin Man (Crispin Glover), chase him, fight him, and lose him — then find Knox tied up nearby.
Sam Rockwell and the Faked Kidnapping
Once Knox is reunited with his business partner Vivian Wood (Kelly Lynch), the Angels infiltrate Redstar headquarters, fool the security system and plant a device in the central computer. Then Dylan spends the night with Knox, and he betrays her. Attacks land on Natalie and Alex at the same time. Bosley is captured by Vivian. Corwin is murdered by the Thin Man.
| Year | Film | Director | Runtime |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | Charlie’s Angels | McG | 98 minutes |
Knox’s kidnapping was faked, he tells Dylan, to get the Angels to help him reach the Redstar satellite network. He intends to use that network and his voice-recognition software to find and kill Charlie, who Knox claims killed his father in the Vietnam War. Dylan escapes.
The twist is the best idea in the movie and, in this paper’s view, the least developed. Rockwell is a real actor playing a fake victim, and the reveal gives the back half a meaner edge than the first hour earns. The problem is that Charlie’s Angels spends its setup on set pieces and arrives at its betrayal with no groundwork.
The supporting cast is deep — Matt LeBlanc as Alex’s boyfriend Jason Gibbons, Luke Wilson as Natalie’s love interest Pete Kominsky, Tom Green as the lovesick fisherman Chad, LL Cool J as Mr. Jones — and most of it is decoration.
Released November 3, 2000, by Sony Pictures Releasing under the Columbia Pictures label, the film grossed $264.1 million worldwide and drew mixed reviews. Its published score is 5.9/10 (TMDB audience score, 4636 votes). The casting is the engine: Diaz, Barrymore and Liu have real chemistry, and Murray’s Bosley is the driest thing on screen. What surrounds them is a thin spy plot that treats its own conspiracy as an excuse.
Charlie’s Angels is a 98-minute commercial for its own stars, and it works about as well as that sounds. The action is competent, the comedy is broader than the show ever was, and the whole thing coasts on charm instead of story.
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