Ángeles del desierto

Eva Green is one of those actresses that I will watch in almost anything. She was fantastic in Casino Royale and Miss Peregrine but since then her best roles have been in french movies like D'Artagnan. She still performs admirably in what is a very basic action movie.

There really is nothing new with this movie. Basic action scenes, girls trying to tough guys and some very bad dialogue. If this movie featured men it would've have Dolph Lundgren as the lead and a couple of UFC fighters in the rest of the cast.

Ruby Rose... in over ten years of acting she has not improved at all. In fact, I would say she has gotten worse. I know a lot of famous actors have made it on their looks only or by using 2 different facial expressions but it just doesn't work for her.

Those reviews which point out the absurdities in this story are likely right. The characters are about as thick a sheet of newsprint, the plotline often suspends belief and the acting frequently trends towards the sound of an American football hitting one of the uprights.

However, if you're an action fan (I am), you will find it pleasurably entertaining to look beyond all of the above and just enjoy a film of the genre that rarely rests for expositional development - character, or otherwise. Campbell's foot is on the gas start to finish and that pleased me. I would agree the final result is fairly wooden, but less than an IMDB 5? Not in this reviewer's opinion. Relax everyone, not every movie these days aspires to 'rosebud' status. That's why you smuggled your own snacks into the theatre, right? Eat, watch and be entertained. Still not sure? Make it a matinee showing and you are likely to agree not only with this review but the price of admission as well.

On one hand, I wasn't expecting much. On the other, I kept waiting for it to "give me something"-a spark, a purpose, or even a moment of intrigue. In the end, I fail to see what the audience is supposed to take away from this.

This movie isn't a joyful experience, nor does it offer anything particularly novel or interesting. It feels quite dull. And it's so unremarkable, that I doubted writing this review. Yet here I am, reflecting on an experience that left me feeling mostly indifferent and dumbfounded.

In terms of presentation, the movie looks good on the surface, but it somehow feels cheap.

None of the characters, aside from perhaps the villain, leave any lasting impression.. and some performances feel questionable. Eva Green appears more washed out than ever, as though she reluctantly took on this role. The group dynamics are flat and only fill in the space. Awkward attempts at humor (revolving around name-calling) and more. Clocking in at nearly two hours, the movie does manage to wrap things up, but the pacing is excruciatingly slow, especially in the first half, leaving you questioning why you're still watching. The bigger question is: What did it actually achieve? What was the point?

Why bother?

Jake (Eva Green) is a U. S. Army Ranger still dealing with the fallout from having been forced to abandon her team during the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. When ISIS storms a girls school in Pakistan and takes hostage several teenage daughters of high ranking officials, Jake is assigned to lead a team of mostly female soldiers masquerading as a NGO medical relief effort in order to find out where the hostages are being kept and rescue them.

Dirty Angels comes to us from independent production company Millennium Media, a company whose foundation ties back to 80s Cannon Films and has worked their way up from producing direct-to-video films to more mainstream fare like The Expendables and Has Fallen series. Dirty Angels comes to us from noted action director Martin Campbell (of Goldeneye and Casino Royale fame) and marks his second time working for Millennium following his assassin film The Protege with Maggie Q. With a low key VOD release Dirty Angels has more production polish than you'd typically expect from this kind of film, but a script that isn't able to pick a tone leads to a rather turgid affair.

In keeping with the company's Cannon lineage, Dirty Angels doesn't really have any aspirations on Afghanistan, ISIS, or the Taliban other than using them as interchangeable goons that are cannon fodder for our protagonists. While the withdrawal from Afghanistan has yielded plenty of media trying to tap into the prescience of the event, the movie lacks the emotional core of The Covenant or the intricate details of Kandahar and instead feels like a crude redress of 80s relics like Missing in Action or other Vietnam War "this time we win" revisionist fantasies that were so popular during the Reagan administration. Despite the cast featuring some good actors like Eva Green, Marla Bakalova, and Jojo T. Gibbs, their characterization is very flat down to the fact the movie insists on knowing them more by their roles like "Medic", "Shooter", "The Bomb" and etc. Rather than actual names. Honestly the most likable characters are two local brothers named Abbas and Malik played by Aziz Capkurt and Reza Brojerdi respectively who mainly serve as comic relief foils to Jake, but as a result they're the most endearing and likable ones in the movie because we actually get to know them beyond their role in the mission.

In terms of action, Martin Campbell has shown himself time and again that he's a reliable staple of the genre and is comfortable behind the camera framing spectacle (Legend of Zorro and Green Lantern notwithstanding). While Campbell doesn't escape unscathed from Millennium's budget scissors (such as some shockingly bad CGI blood in one scene) for the most part he still shows that he knows how to frame an action sequence even at 80+ years old. Unfortunately despite the action being decent, Dirty Angels' lack of commitment to a tone ends up making it all for not and it becomes a rather dull ride that just isn't engaging. While the opening with its brutal stoning sequence and the ISIS attack on the girls school feel like they're aiming for something heavy and serious, other sequences involving the characters showing off laconic swagger or a running gag of Jake's alias being "Jessica Rabit" (pronounced ra-beet) create a distracting tonal clash that never meshes into a fully formed vision. With a name like Dirty Angels and some of the humor on display you get the sense the film wanted to play itself more trashier and with a more exploitative edge than it actually wanted to, but coupled with the lip service to real world events just makes the film feel like a misfire.

Dirty Angels ranks as one of Campbell's lesser entries in his career and despite the action being decently handled (albeit with Millennium's typical quick and cheap mindset) the film doesn't come together into a cohesive whole as it's too glib to make any sort of statement on the real world events it focuses on while also being to leaden and overly serious to make for entertaining exploitation.

The only reason this movie got two-stars is because it manages to equally insult every nationality depicted, and because it has Eva Green and Ruby Rose, among other promising actresses.

Eva Green: I read that she wants to return to theater. Ok, but maybe have your agent find better projects. I don't understand why she ever agreed to do this awful film. It was such a miscast.

Ruby Rose: As an actress she's best suited for the sarcastic, tough character roles, and so it's perplexing that here she gets a different role which doesn't really suit her specific, narrow-ranged talents.

Pretty much everything with this move is bad. Both Martin Cambell (director) and Jonas McCord (writer) should be ashamed of themselves. Alissa Sullivan Haggis (writer), too. Atrocious.