Producing any motion picture requires the risk of millions of dollars. Even for the lowest budget movies that are only released to a smaller subset of art houses around the United States, there is still the risk of a very significant amount of money.

Managing risk producing a movie is where the Movie industry is more like the Insurance industry. When there is an idea for any new movie idea, if there is a guaranteed “built in” audience because of name recognition, some of the risk of spending millions of dollars can be reduced. Even if the TV show, in this case the “Charlies Angels” of the 1970, was bad or even stupid, does not matter, because it is believed that there will still be enough of an audience, to mitigate the risk of spending so much money. This same idea happened two years with the release of the horrendous Baywatch movie. Name recognition with no thought of a story idea, or any kind of a screenplay turned out to be one of the worst movies of 2017.

In this case of the new “Charlies Angels” movie, the hope is that there will also be a sequel, as there was in 2003, for the last time a Charlies Angels movie was released in the year 2000. However this movie is so bad, with critical ratings so low, I doubt that there will be a sequel. The problem with this film is not enough time was put into the screenplay, written by the director who also acted in this film, Elizabeth Banks. The story is ridiculous, disjointed and for the most part made no sense. This entire movie is an excuse to pass one action scene onto the next one, mostly made up of explosions, gunfire and karate.

This movie starts with two Charlies Angels played by Kristen Stewart and newcomer Ella Balinska totally dominating about 8 other armed men in a Karate fight, which is another problem with a movie like this one, believability. There is nothing wrong with Karate in any action movie, but there will always be a problem with preposterous Karate action showing 2 people out fighting 8 others, especially when the other 8 people are also armed.

For those old enough to remember the original Charlies Angels TV series, this movie is better than the TV show, but not enough to make any viewer not feel embarrassed for anyone who is acting in something this ridiculous. The 1970’s TV series was exploitative of the women involved, and just about ruined the career of all the actresses who appeared in the show. Only the late Farrah Fawcett who appeared in TV movies after she left the series after the first year had some kind of a career after Charlies Angels.

I was surprised to see an actor of the caliber of Patrick Stewart in this bad movie, along with Elizabeth Banks and Naomi Scott. There is nothing worth seeing here, no new ideas and a bad story. I agree with all the bad ratings, 57% on Rotten Tomatoes and a very low 4 out of 10 on IMDB. This film should be skipped by everyone, including the few die hard fans of the TV show and the even fewer fans of the last Charlies Angels movie released in 2000.