Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (2003)
aka: Charlie's Angels 2

action comedy

directed by : McG
featuring : Drew Barrymore - Cameron Diaz - Lucy Liu - Demi Moore - Bernie Mac
running time : 1 hour 45 minutes
The three most glamorous and butt-kicking private detectives in the business are back and ready to take on bad guys in this sequel to the 2000 blockbuster screen adaptation of the once-popular television series. Dylan (Drew Barrymore), Natalie (Cameron Diaz), and Alex (Lucy Liu) are once again summoned to the office of their boss Charlie (voice: John Forsythe), where they're introduced to his new right-hand man Jimmy Bosley (Bernie Mac) and given their latest assignment. It seems a pair of rings have gone missing and need to be recovered, but this was no ordinary jewel heist -- the rings have been coded with special information that can be used to access a list of every person in the FBI's Witness Protection Program, and when a handful of protected informants are murdered, the Angels are brought in to help crack the case. As the women search for the culprits, they encounter Madison Lee (Demi Moore), one of Charlie's former agents who decided that the wrong side of the law pays better, and Seamus (Justin Theroux), who once dated Dylan and wants revenge for her decision to turn him over to the police. Luke Wilson and Matt LeBlanc return as (respectively) Natalie and Alex's love interests, as does Crispin Glover as the Thin Man; John Cleese, Robert Forster, and Eric Bogosian also appear in supporting roles.

This is fluffy commercialism at its core, easily discounted as yet another way to make loads of cash from an unattainable feminine ideal. That being said, the Charlie's Angels film franchise turns this ideal into a superhero movie, and the result is more exciting and thrilling than many of its comic book-based contemporaries. With the self-mocking humor, fantasy fighting sequences, dance club pulse, and standard crime-fighting plot, it feels a lot like watching The Powerpuff Girls, only with Cosmo-style sex appeal. With so much flesh on display, the überwomen are granted an even higher propensity for makeup, costumes, and spiked high heel boots. The degree of exaggeration is such that it all becomes a kind of grotesque fashion show, albeit with the trappings of a regular macho action movie. This time around, the superheroes even get supervillains; in keeping with the zero tolerance rule for body fat, Moore is quite repulsive as the ex-Angel vigilante, while Theroux makes a stylishly psychotic ex-boyfriend in a rip-off of Robert DeNiro in Cape Fear. Director McG doesn't hide his music video skills while pumping up the soundtrack at every opportunity for a showy, explosion-filled trifle that at least has the decency to know it's a trifle, as parodied by LeBlanc's action movie premiere of "Maximum Extreme II." Upping her salary to a Julia Roberts level, the well-worn comic persona of Diaz manages a few good moments, despite her horribly thin and unrealistic body. Other than the loathsome subplot involving Cleese and the unfortunate addition of Mac, this sequel improves upon its predecessor as an outlet for girlishly giddy delusions of grandeur.