The Complicated Legacy of the 2000 Charlie’s Angels

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/11/the-complicated-legacy-of-the-2000-charlies-angels

When Drew Barrymore heard that Sony was eyeing a Charlie’s Angels reboot in 1999, she sprang into action. The then 24-year-old had loved the ’70s TV show as a kid and was now intent on being involved in the rare movie project that promised a big budget and audience for a woman-centric action comedy.

Made for a hefty $93 million, Charlie’s Angels opened at No.1 in November 2000, grossed more than $264 million at the global box office, and signaled that female-led action films could, in fact, succeed. Doll versions of Angels Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, and Lucy Liu featuring movable “action-fashion bodies” hit shelves. Rhinestone-adorned aviators became de rigueur among tweens who suddenly had three new heroines to emulate. Liu's casting was also a trailblazing step for Asian-American representation onscreen, and the movie’s ubiquitous anthem, “Independent Women” by Destiny’s Child, stayed at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for 11 weeks, telling a generation of young women, “I depend on me.”

But for all of its Y2K girl-power messaging, Charlie’s Angels is still a movie made mostly by men with a male audience in mind. Depending on how you look at it, it shows a hellscape in which women are expected to look endlessly desirable (whether licking a steering wheel while wearing a race car tracksuit cut down to the navel or bopping around in Spider-Man underwear and telling a delivery man to “stick” it in your “slot”). Or it champions a post-feminist dream world where liberated women don’t have to sacrifice their sexuality or blowouts to save the day. Maybe it’s both.

While ’90s TV had a decent track record of greenlighting women-led series, movie execs were less inclined—especially when it came to action films. After making room for early pioneers like Pam Grier, Sigourney Weaver, and Linda Hamilton, the ’90s was a decade churning out macho dramas like Patriot Games, Speed, Mission: Impossible, Con Air, and buddy comedies Men in Black and Rush Hour. But the small screen successes of Xena: Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer set the stage for Sony to take a gamble on Angels.

To make her initial case to the studio, Barrymore toiled away in a sea of VHS tapes. She pieced together a reel of about 200 clips from her personal library—among them, Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon, the Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase caper Foul Play, and Robert Zemeckis’s Used Cars, starring a disco-dancing Kurt Russell—to show her vision for the film and convince Sony to bring her on board as producer and star of a new kind of Angels. “All they really had at that point was a concept,” she said in 2016. “So [Flower Films partner Nancy Juvonen and I] told them what we would want to do, how we would want to cast it, how we see the world, handpicked the director, on and on and on.”

Barrymore’s influence throughout the film is palpable—as is that of director McG. The entirety of Charlie’s Angels’ 98-minute run is glossy, playful, and overtly sexualized, the inevitable outcome of hiring a music video auteur to make his feature film debut on an action comedy based on “jiggle TV.” While Barrymore handpicked McG and both sang each other’s praises, it’s hard not to look back on certain swaths of the movie as McG bringing his own male fantasies to life.

“I’m like this knucklehead from Kalamazoo, Michigan, and I never got any girls growing up and then I find myself looking over my shoulder and Cameron Diaz is there in a bikini and Drew Barrymore is in a little Swiss Miss costume, and Lucy Liu has got this leather dominatrix thing,” he said at the time. “It was unbelievable.”

The plot—Barrymore, Liu, and Diaz are an elite crime-fighting team who take down a nefarious tech bro (Sam Rockwell) and his cronies (Crispin Glover, Kelly Lynch) in the service of a faceless male millionaire and his go-between, Bosley (Bill Murray)—largely takes a backseat to dozens of costume changes and slow-motion action shots. In the DVD director’s commentary, McG said they wanted to make the “Champagne of movies,” an uplifting romp that “exploded into the pleasure center of the audience’s brain.” And for the most part, they did.

The women have made it clear they had a blast working together, and they radiate that joy onscreen. (The same can’t be said for Murray, who reportedly clashed on set with McG and Liu.) Theirs are Bechdel Test–passing Angels unabashed in owning their sexuality and careers, while still getting B-plot love stories because, as Barrymore explained in 2016, “Look, I’m sorry, girls want love at the end of the day.”