DIRTY ANGELS

 

DIRTY ANGELS reunites Eva Green with her CASINO ROYALE director, Martin Campbell. The new movie belongs to the "Impossible Mission attempted by a motley crew" genre, this time set in the all too-real world of Middle Eastern conflict. 

Eva Green plays Jake, a U.S. Army special operative who has a Mt. Everest-sized chip on her shoulder due to a botched mission in Afghanistan which led to the deaths of her team. Jake takes up a chance for redemption when she joins a mission to save a number of young schoolgirls who have been kidnapped by ISIS forces. The military group which will partake in the mission is to be made up mostly of women, and the plan is to disguise themselves as medical aid workers. The terrorist who killed Jake's team before is the one who has masterminded the kidnapping, and this makes Jake even more determined to succeed--but her truculent attitude may tear the whole plan apart. 

The main reason I watched DIRTY ANGELS is that it starred Eva Green. She gives a totally non-glamorous performance as Jake, a woman who makes the phrase "strong bad-ass independent female" seem like an understatement. Jake is so filled with anger and determination that she borders on being unbelievable (in real life a person like her probably wouldn't have been allowed to go on any more missions). Green does have enough presence to prevent the viewer from not caring what happens to her, but Jake seems more interested in getting a chance to kill people than rescue a group of innocent girls. (Due to the film's main element being young women rescuing other young women, one expects a member of the military team to make a grand speech about how important it is to stop girls from being victimized....but it never happens.) 

As expected in an Impossible Mission scenario, there's plenty of conflict between Jake and the other members of the team. Those other members, however, are barely defined, and none of them sticks out. 

DIRTY ANGELS tries to be a realistic action thriller, and it is quite brutal. It doesn't spare much when it comes to detailing what happens to those who are caught up in the actions of ISIS and the Taliban. Director Martin Campbell (who is also credited with working on the script) is an expert at portraying action, and the battle scenes are the movie's best element, although there's a lot of dodgy CGI explosions. Campbell keeps things moving, and he makes the film's budget seem more than what it probably was (much of the production was shot in Morocco and Greece). 

I thought DIRTY ANGELS was a decent enough action film, but due to its topical brutality it isn't the type of film one wants to watch over and over again. The movie is in an in-between mode--it isn't outlandish enough to be a wild, entertaining violent flick, and it doesn't have enough depth to accurately portray the many complications and issues that make up the current state of Afghanistan.