The title sounds like a Roger Corman exploitation flick from the late 60s, and while the movie does carry such a vibe and will probably please the kind of people who go for that kind of thing, our post-p.c. entertainment environment requires a wider, more worldly sensibility, or, at least, an awareness of it. The angels of the title are a crew of badass American female commandos charged with saving a group of adolescent girls taken hostage from a Pakistan school by an IS offshoot that wants to use one of the hostages—the daughter of an Aghanistan government minister—as a bargaining chip, though it soon becomes clear that their purposes are even more nefarious. The film fulfills its base mission as a shoot-em-up military thriller in the classic mold and extends the carnage by tapping into certain stereotypes about the inherent bloodthirstiness of radical Islam, but there’s nuance in both the plotting and the characterizations that add substance to many of its video game prerogatives.

The reason the U.S. military is involved is that many of the hostages are daughters of American diplomats and businesspeople stationed in Islamabad, a situation that adds complications to the extraction plan grounding the action. The CIA and its military cognates assemble a group of female soldiers who will impersonate an NGO delivering medicine to Pakistan, meaning neither the local government nor Taliban spies are to know who they actually are, despite the fact that Pakistan is a nominal ally of the U.S. and the Taliban are sworn enemies of this particular IS offshoot. These complications make all the difference in the way the story develops, enriching the usual double-crosses and mission setbacks that are endemic to extraction tales. It helps immeasurably that the main character, Jake (Eva Green), is a cynic whose professional principles were betrayed during an earlier mission where she was forced by her superiors to leave comrades behind to be slaughtered. She enters the new mission with a lot more baggage than she can carry and when the male leader gets picked off in a gun battle she has to take over. Green, a resourceful actor who always knows the assignment, manages to transcend her character’s macho schtick, especially compared to her surbordinates, who are all identified by their specialties (The Bomb, The Shooter, Geek, Medic) and don’t much color outside those delineated descriptions. The IS leader, Amir (George Iskander), provides the dastardly goods by being more about his personal power trip than any religious fundamentalism, and his sadistic inclinations will probably do nothing to mediate the American public’s toxic attitude toward Muslim politics of any stripe. 

Martin Campbell, who directed Green previously in Casino Royale, serves the movie’s action mandate well and builds the story to an appropriately apocalyptic climax that’s more ambiguous than you might expect from this material. Though explicit gore, mindless wrath, and pat retribution still rule, Dirty Angels at least pays lip service to historical and geopolitical realities that most similarly inclined actioners ignore outright. 

In English, Pashtun and Arabic. Opens April 10 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955). 

Dirty Angels home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 Dirty Angels Productions, Inc.