When a group of Pakistani students are kidnapped by terrorists, a group of mercenaries led by grizzled veteran Jake (Eva Green) head across the border into Afghanistan to rescue them.
Released last month, I had no idea Dirty Angels had come out until someone mentioned it on a podcast. Ah, the joys of contemporary distribution!
I am a big Martin Campbell fan. I think it fully solidified after watching his 1985 miniseries Edge of Darkness.
He has been on a bit of a tear recently, directing programmer action movies every other year. He has a new film, Cleaner with Daisy Ridley, due out later this year.
While I am happy to see him working regularly, I have not been the biggest fan of this latest stage of his career.
That being said, this might be the first film of his in this run where there is nothing to latch onto.
The Protege suffered from some slight cheapness in terms of seemingly rushed staging and production design. Dirty Angels features a lot of location work, but suffers from a visual flatness that is surprising for Campbells’ work.
One thing I liked about Campbell’s past work is the sincerity he brings to genre fare - his deft hand with Bond, and embrace of the classic swashbuckler in Mask of Zorro. That sincerity seemed to be matched with an awareness of the genre’s cliches, and a certain willingness to deconstruct them.
Spun as a gender-flipped take on The Dirty Dozen, Dirty Angels leans into the genre’s cliches, but with no sense of irony or imagination (beyond the casting). Sadly, it is the first movie where Campbell gets a writing credit.
There is nothing in Dirty Angels where it feels like the filmmakers are aware of the cliches of the soldiers-on-a-mission format, or the cinematic signifiers Hollywood has used to paint Middle Eastern and Central Asian locations.
The score is a collection of familiar tropes that sounds like missing cues from Team America - World Police. The villains are cartoonish caricatures straight of a Cannon movie.
The film has one interesting line of conflict - our heroines have to thread a path between the battle lines of the Taliban and ISIS.
That dynamic might have made for a more interesting film, but the film is more interested in playing like a simple action movie. Which is a problem.
Action movies are built on clear moral lines, with protagonists and antagonists resolving their differences through violence.
It is hard to make an entertaining action thriller in a real-world context. The real world does not operate like an action movie - and this movie wants to have it both ways.
It wants to show the power dynamics of contemporary Afghanistan (let us put aside whether it is accurate at achieving that goal).
This film is too beholden to its context, but not nuanced enough to be making a serious statement about the situation in Afghanistan (or the West’s involvement in the region).
It is too grim to be fun.
And the set-pieces are so blandly, awkwardly staged, it never succeeds as a dumb action movie. The film is often shot in wide, flat compositions that make the actors look like they are cosplaying soldiers.
Even the cast cannot save it.
Eva Green is usually interesting to watch, but here she gives herself fully over to playing an emotionally scarred war veteran. It is the kind of stoic, contained performance that is familiar to the genre - but Green feels like she is playing an impersonation of one of those characters.
The rest of the cast do not get enough to make an impression - the characters’ labels are meant to hide their identities, but they are nothing more than their functions.
The third act is fine but suffers from some confusing geography. And not enough of the titular angels die.
A dour, underwhelming action thriller.
