Charlie’s Angels brought the year 2000 to cinematic life 25 years ago

Thanks to the 1991 success of The Addams Family, movie studios spent a lot of the decade attempting to adapt TV shows from the ’60s and ’70s into big-screen blockbusters. Many of these were inexplicably uncinematic sitcoms and flopped accordingly, but one big success was the Tom Cruise redo of Mission: Impossible in 1996. That movie’s grosses, plus a surge of ’70s nostalgia, likely helped a new Charlie’s Angels get its green light, although the movie itself has many hallmarks of a subsequent production scramble. There are multiple credited big-name screenwriters, a number of far-flung set pieces that seem disconnected from one another, and a running time that just barely passes 90 minutes before the credits roll, as if fulfilling multiplex expectations about the minimum length of a big, spectacle-driven action movie. (More directly reported later on was the on-set conflict between Lucy Liu and Bill Murray.)