Dirty Angels, 2024.
Directed by Martin Campbell.
Starring Eva Green, Maria Bakalova, Jojo T. Gibbs, Ruby Rose, Christopher Backus, Rona-Lee Shim’on, Aziz Çapkurt, Laëtitia Eïdo, Edmund Kingsley, Vassilis Koukalani, Max Kraus, and Nikos Poursanidis.
SYNOPSIS:
It centers on a group of female soldiers who disguise themselves as medics to rescue a group of teenagers caught between ISIS and the forces of the Taliban.
When Eva Green’s American military operative Jake is introduced to her team of fellow female soldiers in Dirty Angels, set to undergo an undercover rescue mission, she exclaims that she doesn’t care about anyone’s name and only wants to know their function. This means that the other soldiers (played by some recognizable names such as faces new to the action genre like Maria Bakalova and familiar ones like Ruby Rose) are given the absolute worst treatment one could give a supporting character in an action film, reducing their character to whatever their special ability happens to be, which here amounts to the usual skill sets such as explosives and computer experts.
More to the point, it makes one wonder what co-writer/director Martin Campbell’s (writing alongside Alissa Sullivan Haggis, Jonas McCord, and Gene Quintano) function is for this film. Yes, it’s a standard VOD prioritized generic action flick. However, it seems to be aspiring to do something much harsher and darker about Afghanistan conflicts circa 2021 without knowing what it wants to say or what point it wants to make. That’s also not surprising, considering there doesn’t seem to be anyone with experience or knowledge of the situation to actually craft a narrative with characters that amount to something more than “Americans good, brown people bad.”
These are waters I don’t even want to wade into just from writing about the film, so Martin Campbell is boldly misguided to think he has anything of substance to add to well-trodden material. There also isn’t anything necessarily wrong with depicting factions such as ISIS as evil, but how their terror is depicted is handled tastelessly and at odds with what also wants to be mindless fun. It’s hard to be entertained when certain aspects are taken grimly seriously and graphically portrayed, as if a realistic portrait of such heinous actions was another goal. Those two tones don’t mesh; not even competently staged third-actor battles and explosions can compensate for that.
The rest of the plot plays into the most overused of action tropes. In the prologue, disaster strikes as Jake narrowly escapes an ISIS kidnapping, although not without casualties, some of which she has been blamed for. Some time passes, and she ends up back in the field on this previously mentioned rescue mission, where, lo and behold, the nefarious villain (George Iskandar) pulling the strings happens to be the one who made her life a living hell. There isn’t much to Jake’s character, although Eva Green is convincingly fierce in putting forth committed physicality, whether it be sparring in a boxing ring pre-mission or running and gunning.
Dirty Angels just also happens to be ugly, with no firm handle on what Martin Campbell intends to do within the Afghanistan setting and these turmoils. If the function was to make a dumb and shockingly violent action flick over the top, that’s acceptable. Here, it is upsetting that the horrors of war are portrayed through the lens of shock value and little characterization. This film is tone-deaf through and through and only finds that groove of entertaining action jingoism in its final 20 minutes; the previous 80 are mostly upsetting and not in the way Martin Campbell intended.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd, or email me at MetalGearSolid719@gmail.com
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