Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003), like its predecessor in 2000, takes the campy elements of the hit television show of the seventies and plays that camp ironically. Where the earlier film tended to take its plot and characters seriously, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle focuses on nothing more than the spectacle of Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu kicking ass and having a total blast while doing it.
Typically such spectacles are the result of the hollow myth making that Hollywood churns out as summer blockbusters. But there’s an accumulative effect to Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle whereby the images of its beautifully femme action hero comedians at play register as a celebration of “female supremacy” by picture’s end. The film is a synthesis of the American Pop Art sensibility of the original television series and of Hong Kong produced films such as The Inspector Wears Skirts (1988), Yes, Madam! (1985), and The Heroic Trio (1993).
Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle takes American action spectacles like the Mission: Impossible franchise (which the film overtly satirizes) and skewers them by outwardly undermining signifiers of masculine desire while simultaneously claiming the action genre for women. The Cameron Diaz character Natalie Cook does the bulk of the work with regards to the former while Lucy Liu handles the latter. This division is imported over from the previous film. However turning Drew Barrymore’s character Dylan Sanders into a conflicted loner and iconoclast is wholly new.
These are all rather subtle machinations couched in an action comedy. The ultimate conceit is that with only minor adjustments an older piece of media can find a new more politically progressive agency and relevance. This was suggested in 2000 with the first film, elaborated upon by Josie & The Pussycats (2001) and then streamlined into a pop confection with Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. Sociologically the payoff of this brief cultural experiment was that for the first time there were action comedies playing the multiplex aimed at teenaged girls.
