Charlie's Angels

Charlie's Angels

Episode 3: Bon Voyage, Angels

By: Carlos Uribe

Charlie's Angels is a remake of the original television series Charlie's Angels.

Spoilers Ahoy!

This may very well be the last episode for Charlie's Angels, so the title fits the show. It's possible ABC might wait until next to cancel the show, so we might get one more episode, but ratings are so low there's a good chance this is the final episode. Will I miss this show? Absolutely not. It's utterly terrible with little to no redeeming qualities. It's not even “so-bad-it's-good”, it's simply “bad”. This show deserves to be canceled-and frankly it shouldn't have been picked up in the first place.

I'm just going to go ahead and state the dialogue of the show seems to get worse as it goes along. I guess the show thinks it's witty and funny, but the lines are simply terrible. The Angels have no charm to at least deliver these lines decently, so the Angels come across as charmless witless characters. This means watching them solve the case tends to fall on the boring side. If the Angels were wittier, or at least charming, then maybe the show could at least be somewhat entertaining.

Not that they have a plot to be witty about. This week the Angels have to go on a cruise ship to look for a missing reporter. At first, we think she was investigating an illegal gambling ring with a bookie. Then the bookie turns out to actually be a front for a drug lord and the people betting are there to place bets on some super heroin drug. Oh yeah, and the bookie's boss has the reporter kidnapped and strapped to a drug machine-thing.

Other shows might have been able to sell the plot. But this show is simply silly even though it's trying not to be (plot-wise at least). For instance, the drug lords drugs all the bidders, even though their all connected with big-time criminals. He then takes them on a speed boat to his personal island, ensuring they have no idea where they are. It simply comes across as idiotic, rather than whatever we're supposed to think (clever?).

To make matters even worse, it squandered the idea of being undercover on a cruise ship. Instead of having fun, the show was too busy trying to solve the case. The original Charlie's Angels would have not only had fun with the cruise ship, but probably a passenger as a love interest. Even when the show seems to want to have fun, the writers hold everything back. There's literally an almost useless scene where one of the characters seduces the bookie-only nothing happens. Really?

Oh, and lest I forget, the show tried to set up some personal conflict with Kate. Turns out the reporter that is missing is the one who exposed her as a dirty cop. There's supposed to be conflict about whether or not to save the reporter who destroyed her career. Everyone keeps talking about it on the show, except for Kate. The actress who plays Kate seems to not even try to pretend like her character is having a personal crisis of sort-she merely looks like she's okay with saving the reporter and there's no inner turmoil. Which makes the whole episode annoying when it keeps bringing up, through other characters, that she has a problem with this. When she clearly doesn't.

I thought in the first week that the critics were simply being too harsh. Now I see that they weren't being too harsh: this episode is outright terrible. The original series wasn't that good, but it wasn't bad either. It was always entertaining and always having fun. This show looks like it's just going through the notions, trying to be funnier than it actually is. Wow, does this show suck.