Journeyman Martin Campbell directs “Dirty Angels,” a by-the-numbers hostage thriller set in Afghanistan, in blunt, workmanlike fashion. The movie takes place in the present day but feels like it could have come out in the mid-2000s, with its one-dimensional characters and cultural oversimplifications within its Middle Eastern setting. It’s an extremely violent film, with people getting shot in the head or stabbed in the neck in gnarly, no-nonsense ways. And the dialogue in the script from Alissa Sullivan Haggis and Jonas McCord is chock full of bland bravado, with the members of an all-women commando team bickering nearly constantly when they bother to address each other at all.
Their leader is Eva Green, doing an iffy American accent as Jake, a tough-as-nails soldier with a troubled past. “Dirty Angels” reunites Green with the director of 2006’s “Casino Royale,” the first film in which Daniel Craig played James Bond, and one that afforded her far more charisma and complexity. Here, she’s doing a version of the classic Jodie Foster persona with her blunt-cut bob, steely stare, and husky, understated delivery. The wiry swagger is there, but the material is less assured.
When ISIS kidnaps a group of teenage girls from an international high school in Pakistan, Jake is called in to lead a ragtag team of military bad-asses to rescue them. They take their names from the jobs they do: Geek (Jojo T. Gibbs) is the tech expert, The Bomb (Maria Bakalova) handles explosives, Shooter (Emily Bruni) is … well, she’s the shooter. And so on. Travis (Christopher Backus) is the longtime colleague who recruits Jake for the mission, while Malik (Reza Brojerdi) and Abbas (Aziz Çapkurt) are the local brothers who provide wild driving skills and wacky, forced humor.
Along those lines, the tone is all over the place here, from intense chases and shootouts to macho insult exchanges to out-of-nowhere pop culture references meant as an efficient method of humanizing these people. Ruby Rose, as a medic named Medic, has a barely-there romance with a doctor named Doctor Mike (Edmund Kingsley), which serves no narrative purpose whatsoever.
Meanwhile, lying in wait and hoping for a $10 million ransom from the American government is Amir (George Iskander), the cartoonishly evil Taliban leader who masterminded the kidnapping. There’s so little to him that he doesn’t even get a chance to be formidable, so when he abruptly kills someone who has crossed or displeased him, it’s not even shocking. This is just who he is.
Having said that, there’s a massive amount of graphic gore here, from prolonged shootouts to exploding Humvees. If you’re looking for that kind of mindless throwback violence, “Dirty Angels” delivers. If only it weren’t such a bore.
In theory, the film could have made a significant statement with the fact that its team of highly-trained, fearless women must go undercover–figuratively and literally, as they wear burqas at times–to save other women. Unfortunately, they’re written with the generic toughness of male mercenaries from 1990s action movies. So when they’re putting themselves in danger to save these girls from the clutches of fundamentalist, patriarchal oppression, it’s hard to feel the emotional heft of that amid the din of explosions and automatic weapon fire.
Particularly at a time when women’s rights are in jeopardy here in the United States and around the world, “Dirty Angels” represents a blown opportunity to say something meaningful amid the mayhem.
