Charlie's Angels

Three Women, One Job, and the Messy Joy of Taking It Seriously

I didn’t expect Charlie’s Angels to feel so invested in competence. That sounds like a dull thing to admire, maybe even a managerial one, but Elizabeth Banks’ 2019 reboot keeps circling back to it: the pleasure of people who know how to do a job, and the irritation of being underestimated while doing it. In a year when a lot of action movies were drowning in self-serious mythology, this one tries something stranger and, to my eye, more useful.

It asks what happens when the “girl power” slogan that used to be slapped on pop culture is turned into an actual working method — call the right person, use the right tool, lie smoothly, break a window, move on.

Banks doesn’t treat the film like a museum piece or a nostalgia machine. That matters. The old Charlie’s Angels brand has always lived in a weird space between commodified glamour and goofy sisterhood, from the Farrah Fawcett era to McG’s glossy 2000s films.

This version is more explicitly a product of the post-#MeToo moment, though I mean that in a broad cultural sense, not as a slogan. Its central anxiety isn’t whether women can kick ass. Obviously they can.

The issue is structural: who gets to design the systems, who gets the credit, and what it means to work inside a male-dominated apparatus that smiles while it exploits you. Banks, who directed and co-wrote, folds that argument into a breezy international caper, but the friction doesn’t disappear. You can feel her trying to make a studio action movie that also knows how patronizing studio action movies can be.

That’s the conversation around the film, really: is it a playful update, a belated correction, or a little too eager to announce its own politics? I think it’s all three, depending on the scene. The movie’s most discussed images are not complicated ones.

There’s the Angels in motion — walking into danger with an almost comically casual confidence — and there’s the hardware: covert tech, earbuds, disguises, gadgets that feel less like fantasy than office supplies with delusions of grandeur. I kept thinking about how often the film literalizes networked labor. Everyone is connected, everyone is on-call, everyone is being monitored.

Even the cool part of the fantasy is under surveillance.

Kristen Stewart’s Sabina is the movie’s happiest surprise. I’ve seen Stewart play brittleness, detachment, fury, private grief — all of it — and here she weaponizes slyness. She slouches like someone who has never once cared about appearing polished, then turns that slackness into a tactic.