Can a Flashdance-style dance number be far behind?

"Good morning, Angels."

"Good morning, Charlie."

"Your assignment this time is to find reasons to jump, spin and slap your butts repeatedly while spouting inane dialogue. Change clothes a lot. Go undercover, even in situations where simply asking questions would suffice. Oh, and it would be especially helpful if you could find a reason to impersonate strippers."

"Sounds fun!"

"Not so fast, Angels. This isn't going to be an easy assignment. The plot is missing."  

"That's never stopped us before, Charlie."

"That's my girls. Did I mention the butt slapping?"

(Giggling.) "Yes, Charlie."

"Until the plot can be located, I'm sending in a special effects team and cameo back up. Oh, and Bosley, I'll need you to randomly recreate scenes from 'The Bernie Mac Show.'"

"I got your back, Charlie. YES! This is awesome, I'm in a movie!"

"The budget is thiiiis big. I'm still not springing for a decent script, though."

Once upon a time, there were three little girls who went to the police academy. But Charlie took them away from all that and they fought crime his way: in hot pants and with a good dose of 1970s style butt-kicking. Fine.

Flash forward twenty-odd years to the movie version of Charlie's Angels. It wasn't enough for the ladies to sniff out the bad guys and hold their own in a fight with a few thugs. They needed to be virtually indestructible, with martial arts skills that would make Bruce Lee bow down before them. All this came in a movie that was moderately fresh and funny and had some visual flair, so still fine.

This time around, director McG and screenwriters John August and Cormac & Marianne Wibberley have cranked up everything but the fresh and fun parts. Remember Cameron Diaz dancing in her underwear in the first movie? This time we have not one but three random dance numbers. You thought the Angels were tough before? Now they're super-powered, inexplicably endowed with the ability to fly, outrun bullets and perform Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-style mid-air maneuvers. Whatever happened to action movies in which the protagonists were actually in danger?

Does this pose really say "tough" to you?

The driving force behind the plot (something about secret decoder rings) seems to be "Wouldn't it be cool if this happened for some reason?" The result is one arbitrary scene after another and the audience is left with nothing to pay attention to except costume changes and wondering how long it will be before the Angels get wet again. Honestly, it makes a girl long for the cohesive storytelling of XXX.

I could live with all that if the movie were fun but this time it just isn't. McG's visual inventiveness has given way to generic action scenes and curiously static expository interludes. The characters are under-developed even by fluffy action movie standards. Natalie (Cameron Diaz) is defined by her brainless grin, Dylan (Drew Barrymore) by her tendency to fall for the bad guy — which we only know because they tell us every five minutes — and Alex (Lucy Liu) isn't defined at all. As the new Bosley, Bernie Mac, with his anxious mugging, only makes me miss Bill Murray's deadpan humor.

Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle tries to gently poke fun at action movie clichés and at times it succeeds. More often than not, though, it lets itself get caught up in those same clichés, while offering us nothing more interesting to balance them out. Someone needs to tell the filmmakers that a movie is more than a series of scenes.

Say good night, Angels.

Gorilla Pants rating: 0.5 out of 4 bananas