Feature: Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle

We're No Angels

After all that action in 2000, the girls are back for more. We hear from Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu and director McG.

“I never thought I’d like to revisit a character, but with Charlie’s Angels I was working with my best friends so it didn’t seem all that much like a job. I couldn’t give up that kind of opportunity,” insists Cameron Diaz, who joins producer-star Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, the highly-awaited sequel to the 2000 hit film. “It’s important to laugh, and I wanted to go to work every day and laugh my ass off. And life out there is pretty tough, and you can’t exist in a horrific world without laughing at it. So that’s why people need movies like Charlie’s Angels.” Cameron, whose work has uplifted movie audiences for 10 years, is back doing what she does best: surfing in a barely-there bikini and performing a Bob Fosse-esque dance number in her underwear.

Adds the former model, who is known for her sunny personality, “With Charlie’s Angels we reached such a wide, enthusiastic audience, and that is essentially why we make movies. The fans wanted another movie and we wanted to give them one.”

“We give them the joy, the colour and the lightness and the fun and the beauty; the Californian ideal,” agrees McG, the film-maker who’s nicknamed Hollywood’s Dr Feelgood.

Joseph McGinty Nichol (nicknamed McG the day he was born) campaigned for six months to get a meeting with Drew Barrymore and her Flower Film partner, Nancy Juvonen. They took the meeting out of courtesy but with his enthusiastic vision of hair-tossing detectives as sexy, empowered women who could do battle and be boys-crazy, McG convinced them that he could do the $90 million production.

“I acted out every scene in the movie,” he recalls. “I had never directed a movie and the studio didn’t want me at first, but Drew threw her arm around me and said, ‘This is the guy I want!’”

McG is a man who knows how to have fun. He used to write Miami Vice scripts for kicks and has directed more than 50 playful pop videos (Smash Mouth, Cyprus Hill, Sugar Ray) and commercials (IKEA, Coors Light, Gap; the khaki dancers doing ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’) before he scored with his film début. Charlie’s Angels might not have had a strong plot, but McG knew how to show Cameron, Drew and Lucy to their best advantage: the girls were beating up bad guys, engaging in slow-motion motorcycle rides and martial arts combat while having perfect hair and changing outfits every minute. He created a wholesome, sexy, marketable world where the good girls got the bad guys and nobody got hurt. “My strength is that I give my projects heart and humanity, a sense of fun and a joy for life,” he says. “I’m a people pleaser.”

by Roald Rynning

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Film Review Special #46

Photo © Columbia Pictures
Feature © Visual Imagination 2003. Not for reproduction

Taken from

Film Review Special #46
Deadly Divas 2003
ships from Jun 5 2003
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