Ever since the disaster that was Green Lantern, one of action cinema’s surest old hands and biggest directors of the ’90s has been toiling away making sturdy, and occasionally lower budget, films. Now 81 years old, most recently Martin Campbell has dabbled in Neeson territory (2022’s Memory), made an unusual Jackie Chan revenge movie (The Foreigner), and gave viewers the truly weird hitman romantic drama The Protege. Now, he’s back with the women-on-a-mission movie Dirty Angels, which reunites him with his Casino Royale star Eva Green, and like the rest of his output over the last decade or so, the project delivers mostly solid journeyman work, goosed with a few welcome idiosyncrasies.
Green plays Army Ranger Jake, who we meet as she’s getting stoned by jihadists. A last-minute helicopter rescue pulls her out, but the rest of her team doesn’t make it, and she watches them get executed as she flies away to safety. She’s so furious about the abandonment that she even tries to have the pilot who saved her court-martialed. Suffice it to say that Jake doesn’t like leaving anyone behind. And that’s precisely why she’s now been chosen to lead an all-female unit undercover into enemy territory to team up with some Taliban forces and rescue a classroom full of young girls who’ve been kidnapped by ISIS. Jake is so wary of forming new attachments that she doesn’t even want to know her new colleague’s names. Instead, she prefers to regard them as their jobs, like Shooter (Emily Bruni) or The Bomb (Maria Bakalova) or Medic (Ruby Rose).
It’s a serviceable enough setup to clothesline some action scenes on, even if its politics feel like something plucked out of a late season of 24. And Campbell delivers said action amicably, with lots of bloody shootouts and excellent explosions that toss stuntmen pirouetting into the air, all cleanly expressed with a minimum of coverage and cutting. It’s all executed well enough to make you a little nostalgic for the old ways, even if the action sequences have a patient, measured pace that might feel a bit slow for a contemporary audience fed a diet of CGI chaos. The violence on display is also quite brutal, especially when we reach the climax.
With regard to the cast, though, there isn’t as much to say, since beyond Jake the other women are thinly sketched and mostly there to offer expository dialogue — this is the Eva Green show. The actress gets to do almost all of the lifting here, playing Jake as so closed-off that her natural ruthlessness is amplified to the point of cruelty. She’s clearly having a blast with the role despite the utter seriousness of the entire proceeding, and it’s yet another genre movie in which the performer with presence to spare proves to be most successful element. Dirty Angels is hardly a perfectly film, but it’s Green, even more than Campbell, who makes the material work.
DIRECTOR: Martin Campbell; CAST: Eva Green, Maria Bakalova, Ruby Rose, Jonica T. Gibbs; DISTRIBUTOR: ddd; IN THEATERS/STREAMING: December 13; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 30 min.
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