Cinema
Too many Chads
Mark Steyn
For us Presidential correspondents who carelessly signed on for Campaign 2000 unaware that it would run until 2003, there's nothing like a light, frothy, escapist movie to take your mind off manual recounts and county canvassing boards. Down in Florida, it may be a chad chad chad chad world, but for a couple of hours in the dark of the picture palace a man can forget he ever learned the subtle distinc- tions between hanging and swinging chads, pregnant and dimpled and flat chads.
That was the theory. But Charlie's Angels opens with a deshabille Dylan (Drew Bar- rymore) crumpling the sheets on a house- boat skippered by a goofball called ... Chad. How did that happen? In all the time I've been reviewing motion pictures, I can't recall one with a single Chad in it. Okay, okay, before you fire off sneering missives, there was Chad E. Donella, who gave a somewhat disappointing perfor- mance — very much a flat Chad, I'm afraid — as Tod in Final Destination (2000). And there was Chad Lindberg, who played a deaf drag queen — a well-hanging Chad miming the songs of Patsy Cline in The Velocity of Gary (1999). And let's not forget Chad Christ (really), who played Zach the cute drama student — a dimpled Chad at Reagan High in Jawbreakers (1999). Plus, on the distaff side, Chad Morgan, who played the promiscuous best friend Brenda — a swinging Chad who nearly ended up a pregnant Chad — in Whatever (1998).
But, even so, what are the statistical odds of a Chad showing up just in time for the Florida recount? This latest Chad is played by Miss Barrymore's current beau, Tom Green, an Ottawa comedian best known for having the surgical removal of his defective testicle televised. Even more pre- sciently, Chad refers to himself as 'The Chad', so that the dialogue is indistinguish- able from the conversations currently going on in the counting rooms of the dodgier Florida counties. When Dylan dresses and scrams without waiting for breakfast, Chad shouts after her as she leaves: 'Is it The Chad?' It might be The Chad,' admits Dylan. Later on, though, The Chad returns, piloting his houseboat down the coast to help rescue Bosley, Charlie's right-hand man. Once again, Dylan leaves in a hurry, diving into the briny. Once again, The Chad wants to know: 'Is it The Chad?' But not this time. 'The Chad was great!' Dylan shouts back.
On the non-Chad front, not much has been retained from the old TV show (1976-81) except the disembodied voice of Charlie, played then as now by John Forsythe, later to triumph as blue-haired Blake in Dynasty, and the producer, then as now Leonard Goldberg. Charlie's Angels was, he tells us, 'the beginning of the empowerment of women within popular culture'. Really? Back in the Seventies, it was said to have ushered in the era of 'jig- gle TV', an industry term deriving from the way Kate Jackson, Farrah Fawcett and Jaclyn Smith spent most of their time chas- ing after people while their finer points bounced around the screen like a primitive computer game. Jiggle has been in short supply since the hardbody look came in. The gals on Baywatch also run around a lot but to the opposite effect: heads, arms, legs all move, but the breasts stay fixed on course with the determined precision of a Scud missile.
Happily, the film offers both jiggle and empowerment, or, at any rate, empowering jiggliness. The Bond-esque opening begins high in the sky, with an in-flight movie based on William Shatner's old cop show, T.J. Hooker. 'Not another mqvie from an old TV show,' sighs one of the passengers, letting us know early on that this project knows it's a piece of cheesey opportunism and knows we know it, too. A quarter-cen- tury ago, the Angels spent a lot of time flipping their hair. They still do, only now they do it in slow motion and as a kind of parodic talisman. Meanwhile, the sound- track plays 'Undercover Angel', 'Angel Of The Morning', 'Heaven Must Be Missing An Angel' and other angelic hits of the Seventies.
Directed by someone called McG with the disinterest one would expect from a pop-video maestro, the plot is so lame it would barely sustain one of those old TV episodes, never mind a full-length feature. But in the second half, as it becomes a race to save the life of the unseen Charlie, it comes to be strangely affecting, bringing the relationship of the Angels to their absentee father-figure into sharper focus than the TV series ever did.
In the end, though, all it has going for it is its trio of Angels — redhead Miss Barry- more (Dylan), brunette Lucy Liu (Alex) and blonde Cameron Diaz (Natalie) — and the fact that all three are obviously having a ball. Unlike tough old grumps like Demi Moore, these chicks don't see why you shouldn't be able to defuse bombs, speak Japanese and be girly. So they're happy to run around in gold lame bikinis and wet suits unzipped to the navel and to demon- strate their mastery of disguise by showing up as a trio of yodelling telegrams in skintight dirndls and lederhosen. Every Angel has her moment: Lucy Liu infiltrates the enemy's corporate headquarters as an efficiency consultant who comes on like a whip-wielding dominatrix; Drew Barry- more, tied to a chair, nevertheless takes out a roomful of her captors and then moon- walks away; and, in the best scene in the picture, Cameron Diaz and her date go to a taping of Soul Train and she gets to do a geeky honky go-go dance to Sir Mix-A- Lot's 'Baby Got Back' that drives the crowd wild. At such moments, Charlie's Angels seems like a throwback not to the Seventies but to the Forties, to an age of agreeable B-movies that got along on lik- able stars evidently enjoying themselves. Why begrudge them?
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