Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle

Give the people more of what they want, right? The first instalment of the Charlie's Angels franchise was a guilty pleasure, as we watched super-babes Lucy Lui, Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz battle evil on the big screen. People liked the intriguing combination of action and sex appeal, so why not make the sequel with even more explosions and asses? Full Throttle definitely delivers on both, but fails horribly everywhere else, as there's talk about some sort of plot with two rings, but it gets buried way deep amongst countless scenarios that call for the Angels to race motocross bikes or perform a striptease. Not only are the character-building scenes that involve actual dialogue omitted this time, but there's really no flare to the action sequences because they occur so often that you're quickly bored of Lucy Liu doing splits to "Firestarter," as hard is that is to believe. The outcome of this greatly disappointing sequel could easily be pegged on one of the DVD's featurettes, in which director McG makes mention of adding monster trucks into Full Throttle for no real reason other than he thought it would be cool. After watching more of the far-too-long mini-documentary on the flashy muscle cars used in Full Throttle, it's quite apparent that McG's vision of more action is nothing more than indulging his own material need to be surrounded by Ferraris and bikinis. While four featurettes cover the usual action sequences and stunt choreography, things such as costume design are given nothing more than a musical montage. Given the fact that the Angels are the stars of this film, sitting through McG talk shop with Bigfoot's driver is far from interesting, or relevant. Some of the good qualities of this package are the fact that everything was crammed onto one disc, forgoing the mighty double-disc claim and instead delivering a well-organised presentation for a horribly misguided film. Plus: telestrator commentary with McG, writers commentary, Pink music video, guide to cameos, trivia track. (Columbia)