I didn’t like the first Charlie’s Angels much, but to my surprise I loved Full Throttle, even when seeing it twice in two days. Perhaps I was in a better mood to appreciate the outright silliness and action-extreme than I was when watching the first one. Or perhaps it really was better?

As far as there’s a plot to outline: The angels are sent out by Charlie to recover a stolen database containing information about people in the FBI witness protection program. That’s about all I need to explain as the story is simply a loose skeleton for director McG to hang all the visual jokes and action on. But that’s what I liked about it, the film exists simply to have a laugh; be it at the scripted jokes and sometimes surprisingly good comic timing of Lucy Liu, Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore or at the totally over the top action sequences.

Admittedly, there were scenes that were hammed-up in the wrong way so that they weren’t funny anymore, but on the whole I liked things like hearing the Flashdance theme tune when the angels go undercover as welders in a shipyard. The action sequences are horrendously chroma-keyed and it’s all as fake as can be, but partly on purpose. Bring out your sunglasses ’cause the whole film is saturated in colour! I also suspect that there are more edits in the fight scenes than were made in all of Hollywood in 1933.

There are some great small guest roles such as Pink, John Cleese, Chris Pontius (a.k.a. Partyman from Jackass), Jaclyn Smith (as Kelly Garrett – original 70′s Angel who hasn’t aged an inch) and Bruce Willis. What Willis is doing in there I do not understand. He didn’t even fit the role. Perhaps ex-wife Demi Moore asked him as she plays ex-Angel-gone-bad, Madison Lee. I am divided about her success playing the bad-’guy’. She sometimes has that evil, sexy look, but she kept hanging her mouth open to look nastier and that looked a little silly to me. As you can imagine, there was a lot of long hair swishing about in the fight scenes though.

There were some confusing aspects to the story and scenes, mainly caused by mumbled, undecipherable lines. I understood the lines better the second time round – but let’s face it, that’s one time too many, even for a film that doesn’t take its own storyline too seriously.

That said, I really did enjoy myself during this one and within its ‘genre’ I think it was much more successful than something like Johnny English.

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