Charlie's Angels [Blu-Ray]

Tom Green and Drew Barrymore doin' it. Let the image marinate in your mind: Tom Green's thin, sweaty frame, pungent with body odour, naked and moist against Barrymore's nubile flesh. Yes, the year was 2000 and Barrymore and Green were at the peak of their whirlwind romance. Shoehorned into two scenes of his lady friend's big-budget action comedy Charlie's Angels (riffing like a madman as Barrymore's on-screen pseudo-love interest "Chad"), Green's aggressively wacky shenanigans will forever remind a weary world of a time in which he shared a bed with America's sweetheart. So, if that's what you're looking for, by all means check out the new Charlie's Angels Blu-Ray. If not, rest assured there are many other year-2000 signifiers to satisfy your hunger for millennial nostalgia: an LL Cool J cameo; Bill Murray with hair dye; a Destiny's Child theme song; heck, even Lucy Liu. Seeing Charlie's Angels again after all these years was certainly a nostalgic experience, reminded as I was of the joy it brought me at age 11. To my young eyes, the scene where the Angels rise from the ocean in slow motion and take off their wetsuits (backs to the camera, of course) was just about the most erotic sight I had ever fathomed. Ditto the scene in which Cameron Diaz energetically shakes her backside in tiny panties, or when Drew Barrymore ― gulp ― seductively unzips her top a little. The thing about Charlie's Angels is, the older one gets, the more this movie stays the same, with one's enjoyment still hinging on one's desire to see Diaz, Barrymore and Liu in mildly-revealing outfits, smothered with so much lighting and makeup they might as well be Maxim models. There is a plot somewhere ― sorta, kinda ― but it's really just a series of loosely related skits where the Angels display cleavage or wire-fu bad guys, plus random interludes of context-free Bill Murray and Tom Green comedy. The Angels, alas, are so interchangeable that it's hard to get terribly invested in their escapades, and the film surrounding them is never really funny, nor remotely exciting, nor anywhere near as sexy as it was when I was 11. All this certainly pokes a hole in the theory that the film is "mindless fun," but at least the bright colours look nice on Blu-Ray and the commentary by director "McG" confirms my long-held suspicion that the opening steadicam shot was an homage to Goodfellas. In conclusion: Tom Green and Drew Barrymore doin' it.