Charlie's Angels: Angel with a Broken Wing (1.1)

I hate to be one of those guys that perpetuate the horrible notion that actresses on female-driven shows all hate each other behind the scenes, but the new Charlie's Angels really hate each other. I saw them last weekend on E!'s coverage of the Emmy's red carpet, and I have literally never seen such cold women who clearly can't stand the sight of one another. Poor Rachael Taylor is trying to sell the thing in a way that could come across as wildly overbearing, a stern Minka Kelly is all passive-aggression and anger, and Annie Ilonzeh is quiet and pretty. It was such a weird spectacle, three ladies who weren't even attempting to put across some kind of friendship or chemistry. Then again, all three are terrible actresses. So what do you expect?

I was never a huge Charlie's Angels fan. I've only seen a couple of episodes of the show, and that was years ago. But while I adore anything remotely trashy and camp, Angels always struck me as ridiculously dumb, one of a whole bunch of lame '70s shows that threw stereotypes at the wall until something stuck and seemed designed by committee to appeal to horny frat guys and little girls who should know better. As Hollywood has stumbled into the age of the remake, here's an unnecessary Charlie's Angels reboot, which proves to be an embarrassing misfire which struggles to find its identity.

Charlie's Angels, however you try and spin it, was always about hot chicks fighting crime. In that regard, the pilot for the 2011 reboot is a success. The leads are all attractive ladies who look great in tight outfits and are pretty convincing when kicking folks and wielding guns. But they're stuck inside a script that fails pretty much everywhere else. Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, who struck gold with Smallville years ago, have written some of the most cringe-inducing dialogue this fall, and grounded the Angels in a world that tries to appear legit and 'real' with the sex trafficking and torture, while at the same time ignoring the sense of fun and triviality that naturally radiated from the original show. In the end, the pilot just becomes boring, which is criminal for a show like this.

Of the Angels themselves, Taylor and Ilonzeh don't make a huge impression, while the other one is just staggeringly awful. Vacancy has a name, and that name is Minka Kelly. The funniest moment in the episode is when her character catches a glimpse of a murderous drug lord from her childhood, and Kelly's expression is so empty of anything remotely resembling an emotion that she may as well be deciding what to eat for lunch. Elsewhere, a surprising shocker in terms of casting arrives in Victor Garber's monotonous Charlie. It sounds like they had trouble casting the Angels' enigmatic patriarch (Robert Wagner was dropped after the unaired pilot), and Garber literally sounds like somebody reading off cue cards. It only helps you respect what John Forsythe did with such a thin role in the original series.

Charlie's Angels painstakingly avoids the campiness that this brand seems to be screaming out for, forcing its vacuous leads to struggle to make sense of what world they're in. It's a flat, bizarre failure of a pilot, and something tells me it won't be around long enough to improve. D

Credits
Guest stars Carlos Bernard (Rodrigo Pajaro); Ivana Milicevic (Nadia Ivanov); Nadine Velazquez (Gloria Morales)
Writers Alfred Gough, Miles Millar Director Marcos Siega