The girls just wanna have fun in 'Full Throttle'

By Steven Rea
Knight Ridder Newspapers

CHARLIE'S ANGELS: FULL THROTTLE Stars: Produced by Leonard Goldberg, Drew Barrymore and Nancy Juvonen, directed by McG, written by John August, Cormac Wibberley and Marianne Wibberley, photography by Russell Carpenter, music by Edward Shearmur, distributed by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 1 hour, 51 mins. Parent's guide: PG-13 (violence, profanity, sexual innuendo)

In "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle," Natalie, Dylan and Alex (Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu, respectively) get to pose — and strike poses — as nuns, strippers, crime-scene technicians, motocross demons, ship welders, surfer chicks and, if you hang around for the end credits, car-wash babes, getting down and sudsy for the sake of a dirty automobile.

And it's all in the line of duty — helping their eponymous speaker-box boss to squash villainy and evil by any means possible. Booty-shaking a must.

Reteamed with the rock-video director-turned-franchise-maker McG (Joseph McGinty Nichol to his mom and dad), the saucy triumvirate spawned from Leonard Goldberg's `70s TV show have cranked up the volume for movie No. 2. The martial-arts sequences — starting with a Mongolian barroom kickfest, where Diaz, in the guise of a Scandinavian snow-bunny, rides a mechanical yak — are like the Flying Wallendas on speed. Gravity-defying, free-falling, hanging-on-by-a-pinky (perfectly manicured, of course), quadruple-somersaulting stunt action abounds, and although a lot of it is CGI-enhanced, the girls come off a whole lot more real-looking than the Hulk.

Like the "Austin Powers" series, whose spirit of winking innuendo McG and company have embraced (and then some), "Charlie's Angels" hasn't taken long to start with the self-referential in-joking. And they've got a whole television series to allude to, too. Enter Jaclyn Smith, one of the original Angels, materializing in a Mexican saloon to offer sage, Obi-Wan-like counsel to a despairing Dylan. (Barrymore definitely plays the moodiest of the three, pouting into the middle-distance with her hurt feelings and sparkly eye shadow.) Other cameos, credited and not, come from Robert Forster, Eric Bogosian, Mary-Kate and Ashley, Eve, Pink, Carrie Fisher and Bruce Willis.

And speaking of Willis, let's not forget his ex, the uber-buff and Cher-doed Demi Moore. "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle" represents an official coming-out party for the back-from-semiretirement star. As Madison Lee, a one-time Charlie's girl who now has bigger, badder fish to fry, Moore packs a pair of gold-plated pistols and a sneer that could scare your socks off.

"Why be an Angel when I can play God?" Moore's Madison wonders, addressing the Angels down her double-barrels at the Griffith Park Observatory. And don't think Moore's character is just a lot of lithe, personal-trainered sinew — the Angel-gone-bad is also, we're told, a Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist. Which may explain how she can launch herself from the roof of a Hollywood hotel and sail to the boulevard below without help from ropes, wires, ladders, parachutes or invisible helicopters. Next thing you know, Super-Demi will be battling the X-Men.

Gleefully airheaded and slick, "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle" serves up platefuls of familiar offerings. Diaz has another pair of Spider-Man undies up for grabs (so to speak); the trio do an impromptu, shimmy-shimmy dance number (M.C. Hammer's "U Can't Touch This"); Matt LeBlanc and Luke Wilson reprise their roles as Angel beaus; and Crispin Glover returns as the mysterious Thin Man (and turns out to be a screaming hair fetishist). And, yes, good old John Forsythe once again provides the voice of Charlie.

Newcomers include an amiably buffoonish Bernie Mac, replacing Bill Murray as the fatherly facilitator, Bosley (they're brothers or something), and John Cleese, who, as Alex's dad, has somehow gotten it into his head that his beloved daughter and her two best buds are operating as call girls.

Which is one role, at least, that the Angels have yet to explore.