'Dirty Angels' Fails to Impress Critics

         On December 13, 2024, Lionsgate released 'Dirty Angels', which received a predominantly negative reception from critics and a score of 38% on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of this writing. In the film, "Soldiers in an all-female commando unit pose as members of a relief organization to save a group of girls taken hostage by terrorists in Afghanistan." The ensemble cast includes Ruby Rose, Eva Green, Jonica T. Gibbs, and Maria Bakalova. Read the full review round-up below.

        Matt Lynch of In Review Online says, "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." Adding, "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."

       Aaron Peterson of The Hollywood Outsider notes, "Despite the lack of humor (and a handful of spotty effects), Dirty Angels is a pulpy good time. Director Martin Campbell knows this genre back-to-front and has delivered yet another entertaining bloodbath with more than its share of plot twists." Concluding, "Though the team and the script both are effective, engaging and, at times, even surprising, one element that is slightly lacking is fun. Grounded in realism, Dirty Angels is a very gritty mission-style scenario, but having a jovial aspect often elevates the best in the genre. Other than a few welcome winks and quips from Bakalova, this grouping is more intense than John Wick at a puppy mill."

       Nick Rogers of Midwest Film Journal was less impressed, stating, "There are some interesting intertextual ideas about the delusion of American exceptionalism and a very strong fight scene involving Eva Green that's both sword fight and street fight. But this is otherwise merely the latest mediocre Martin Campbell movie."

Photo by Josh Eckstein on Unsplash

        Robert Taylor of Collider writes, "Dirty Angels is largely structured like a heist movie, with most of the screen time devoted to preparing for the big rescue. And that's really the problem number one here. For an action film, there's surprisingly little of it. The first significant action sequence doesn't occur until 50 minutes into the movie. By the time the Angels, disguised in burkas, storm the bad guys' compound, there are only 15 minutes of the movie left. The rest of the runtime is filled with endless planning and some light intrigue. The team makes various alliances with local power players, some of whom will later be revealed to be double-crossers with secondary motivations. The film also spends a lot of time trying to build out a world where sometimes you have to ally with the lesser of two evils, but the political observations the movie offers feel both too superficial and ill-fitting for the story at hand. This is a sub-two-hour "women on a mission" action movie, which isn't the ideal platform to sneak in a detailed breakdown of the geopolitical history of the Middle East. None of it proves to be very interesting, and plot specifics often feel like they're from a lesser episode of 24."