If I Could Give “Charlie’s Angels” Negative Stars, I would

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Ellis Smith, Contributing Writer

With amazing actors like Naomi Scott and Kristen Stewart, you’d think you would have an amazing movie, right? Wrong. My expectations for the movie were fairly high because of seeing the trailers, but sadly the trailers mostly only show off the stuff that happens near the credits. The only good parts of the movie.

The new “Charlie’s Angels” movie is a continuation of the 70’s “Charlie’s Angels” show and two other movies produced in 2000 and 2003. The plot of the new movie surrounds Elena (Naomi Scott), a systems engineer that takes krav maga lessons, a style of martial arts, once a week. When she discovered a flaw in a project she’s working on and goes to tell her boss, he pushes her aside. Wanting to do something to stop the product before it goes on the market, Elena contacts Charlie’s Angels, a female spy group. Without giving away the whole movie, that is about it in a nutshell. Unfortunately, the plot twists were nothing shocking.

The Charlie’s Angels movie was released Nov 2019 and was co-written and produced by Elizabeth Banks, who made a cameo in the movie as one of the Bosleys (one of the head people in the corporation). Banks can also be seen in “Hunger Games” as Effie Trinket and Gail Abernathy-McKadden in “Pitch Perfect.” While both a great actor and director, I don’t think she will win any award for her writing in this movie. The script was predictable and basic and it seemed like something you would read in pre-teen books. The movie does look at empowering women, and while I commend them on placing women in a powerful light, they shouldn’t have used it as a coverup for the horrendous storyline. Throughout the movie, you see scenes of two of the main characters Sabina (Kristen Stewart) and Jane (Ella Balinska) taking down bad guys, The characters all do amazing fighting scenes and it’s said that Ella Balinska did most of her own which are pretty incredible. While I do have problems with the scripts, the fight scenes between the bad guys and the Angels were pretty epic. For example, at the start of the movie when Sabina swings around a guy using a curtain and captures all of his limbs, proceeding to then beat him up.

When they weren’t fighting, we got to see their personalities (or Jane’s lack of one). Jane is portrayed as a hard worker who has no emotions and doesn’t play well with others. I think I can name multiple movies with female leads like this in them. Why is it that if a woman is strong they are most likely detached from everyone? I mean, come on, why can’t a woman that’s strong also be kind-hearted and nice? Towards the end of the film, Jane cries. That’s right, she has two emotions, emotionally detached and crying. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that women should be all sugar and spice and everything thing nice, I’m just saying that Jane was portrayed as the overused stereotypical strong woman.

Another problem was while Naomi Scott, Ella Balinska, Kristen Stewart and Noah Centineo are amazing actors the script doesn’t show off the best of their actions. Everything they said sounded so fake that you couldn’t get a good grasp of the movie.

While there is a lot of bad in the script, there is also a silver of good. The scenes mixed in with the end credits were hilarious to watch and there were some scenes throughout the film that I did enjoy. However, I don’t think that’s a good enough reason to pay to watch the movie.

The movie also shows awesome costumes (though that could be because I like anything that has sparkles on them). In one scene that is sorta cool, the girls go into the costume closet where the advice gets to see many of the outfits that were featured in the first two movies, which is something I always love to see. Little touches like that can make any movie better.

Ultimately, I wouldn’t waste your money on “Charlie’s Angels”. I mean if you really want to see it even after reading this review, wait for it to come out on DVD and get it in the library.