Charlie’s Angels (2019)

Official trailer

Charlie’s Angels (2019) is the second reboot of the 1976 television series and among the most commercially unsuccessful spy-action films of the late 2010s.

Elizabeth Banks wrote, directed, and co-starred. Kristen Stewart plays Sabina Wilson. Naomi Scott plays Elena Houghlin, an engineer whose energy-system invention is being weaponized. Ella Balinska plays Jane Kano, the team’s combat specialist. Patrick Stewart plays Bosley. Djimon Hounsou plays another Bosley. Elizabeth Banks plays Rebekah Bosley. Sam Claflin plays Alexander Brok, Elena’s employer, who turns out to be one of the villains.

The plot follows the Angels protecting Elena and her invention from a conspiracy that involves multiple Townsend Agency members.

This one made me cranky. I like Kristen Stewart, I like the Rio opening, and I like the idea of a smart, funny Angels reboot, and the film squanders all three by stopping every few minutes to explain itself to me. It’s a 3 because a few scenes show the movie it could have been, and that makes the rest more irritating.

The film made approximately seventy-three million dollars worldwide on a forty-eight million dollar budget. After marketing, it was a commercial failure. The reviews were largely negative.

Elizabeth Banks’s public response to the failure attributed the underperformance to audiences not supporting female-led action. The response was widely criticized at the time and is widely cited as the moment the late-2010s woke-reboot wave’s defensive framing reached its peak absurdity.

What Made It a Woke Disaster

The film opens with Kristen Stewart’s Sabina delivering a monologue directly to camera. The line is “I think women can do anything.” The opening positions the audience inside a feminist statement before any plot has begun. The framing is unambiguous. This isn’t going to be a Charlie’s Angels reboot that argues women can do spy work through demonstration. This is going to be a Charlie’s Angels reboot that tells the audience women can do anything in case the audience needed informing.

That opening line made me wince. The Rio sequence proves the point far better than the speech does, and I’d have cut the monologue entirely and let Stewart’s timing and the fight choreography do the arguing.

The Townsend Agency expansion is the film’s structural argument. The 1970s television series and the 2000 film both had a single Bosley as Charlie’s voice. The 2019 reboot replaces this with a global network of multiple Bosleys (including Banks’s Rebekah Bosley). The expansion is positioned as feminist organizational redesign. The Townsend Agency is no longer one man’s surveillance operation. It’s a worldwide woman-led network. The structural change is meant to show that the property has evolved past its 1970s structure into a 2019 structure.

The Sam Claflin reveal is the film’s most explicit thesis statement.

The film presents Brok as the boss Elena trusts with her invention and John Bosley as the Angels’ fatherly mentor. Both turn out to be villains, and Bosley is the traitor at the center of the plot. The script’s argument is that male allyship is the cover for male villainy. Even the men who present as supportive of women’s work are dangerous. The film stages the reveal as moral revelation instead of as plot twist. The audience is meant to extract a lesson about the unreliability of supportive men.

The Banks Aftermath

Elizabeth Banks’s post-release statements about Charlie’s Angels became a more-discussed cultural moment than the film itself.

Banks suggested in interviews that the film’s failure indicated audiences weren’t ready to support female-led action. The criticism was that 2017’s Wonder Woman, 2019’s Captain Marvel, and the John Wick action films with female supporting leads had all performed strongly in the same general period. The audience was clearly willing to support female-led action. The Charlie’s Angels reception was about this film’s failures and had nothing to do with gender politics.

The Banks framing damaged the film’s reception further.

Banks told audiences who’d been disappointed that they’d been disappointed for the wrong reasons, and the craft problems (uneven tone, underused supporting players, sermon-driven plot beats) went undiagnosed because the conversation stayed on the controversy. I find that response more irritating than anything in the film. Blaming the audience is the easiest way to avoid looking at the script, and this script needed looking at.

The Kristen Stewart Problem

Kristen Stewart is the film’s most successful individual element.

Stewart plays Sabina with the dry comedy that’s characterized her best work since Adventureland (2009). The performance is calibrated and committed. The script doesn’t match her energy. Stewart’s comedic tone works when she’s given the space to work. The script keeps interrupting her work with sermon beats and demonstrative action sequences that fit different performers better.

The supporting team development is uneven. Naomi Scott’s Elena gets the most real arc as the audience-surrogate engineer.

The film introduces Ella Balinska’s Jane Kano as the combat specialist and gives her the least material relative to her function. The trio dynamic that should have been the film’s foundation never fully develops because the script doesn’t give the three performers equivalent character work. The team feels assembled instead of built. The result is a Charlie’s Angels reboot whose Angels don’t have the chemistry the 2000 Diaz-Barrymore-Liu trio had.

Balinska is the one I feel worst for. She has real presence, and the script hands her almost nothing to do with it. I kept wanting the film to let the three of them simply hang out and bicker, because that easy chemistry is the whole reason I’d sit down to an Angels movie.

Should you skip Charlie’s Angels?

3/10. Kristen Stewart and the Rio pre-credits sequence are the only parts I’d sit through again, and they’re good enough to make everything else look worse.

The opening monologue, the multi-Bosley expansion and the Sam Claflin reveal all stop the story to deliver a lecture, and Banks’s post-release blame game made it worse. The 2000 Diaz-Barrymore-Liu reboot is the better cinematic Angels and far more fun. Watch that instead.

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