Charlie's Angles is a movie that is all about style and happily tosses substance out the window. While watching the movie I got the feeling that individual scenes were dreamt up not for how well they would work with other scenes, but rather for how cool the stars would look in them. The shooting script might have read like this:

Scene 1: The Angels look cool while jumping out of a plane.

Scene 2: The Angles look cool while driving a boat.

Scene 3: The Angels look cool while racing a car.

You get the idea.

All the while, the film borrows its look and style heavily from The Matrix, James Bond and countless other films. As is, Charlie's Angles is nice to look at, but had even a fraction of its visual efforts been put into a better story it might have really been something. The movie aspires to poke fun at the Angels television show, the super spy genre and several other pop culture icons in the same fashion as the Austin Powers films, yet it never really has the guts to go for the really good jokes. The comedy is there, but the film never effectively finds it.

Perhaps that isn't entirely fair.

The story tries for complexity, which is far more than the lighthearted nature of the film deserves. Basically, computer mogul Eric Knox (Sam Rockwell, playing Knox as sort of a hip Bill Gates) is kidnapped and his partner hires Charlie's Angels to find him. The catch is (here is the obligatory spoiler warning, however anyone with half a brain - which obviously doesn't include any of the three Angels - can see this twist coming in the first act), Knox wasn't really kidnapped. In fact, he has his own plans to destroy Charlie and his Angels.

The actions scenes are well done and the Angels do look good. I can't really say this is a completely bad film as long as you never expect much from it. It's popcorn. I like to call this sort of movie Chinese Food Cinema - in the way that Chinese food fills you up for two hours and then you're hungry again, this film entertains you for two hours and then you're hungry for a real plot.