DIRTY ANGELS is not the newest Martin Campbell joint – that’s CLEANER starring Daisy Ridley – but the one from 2024, now on DVD in Canada. I don’t exactly know the events that shifted Mr. Campbell from A-lister who kicked off the last two eras of 007 and did the motherfuckin MASK OF ZORRO to journeyman in the trenches making barely released, mostly generic but pretty cool female-driven action movies, but I’m not gonna knock it. There are many worse trajectories to take in life.

This one is Afghanistan War Movie #562 (set as the war is ending, like most of them now), but the female stars and commando nature of the conflict do make it stand out a little. You have your vicious terrorist leader (George Iskandar), local contacts and lack of trust, but there are no raids on houses, it’s low on desert, and it’s about rescuing hostages ISIS abducted from an all girls school in Pakistan. Can’t object to that cause.

It’s a team movie but mostly it’s a star vehicle. Our traumatized, disgraced and looking for redemption elite soldier plucked away from a court martial to reluctantly lead the rescue mission is Jake, a character we’ve basically seen before, except not played by Eva Green. Do I believe tattoos and tired eyes are enough to make her twiggy body seem like a deadly weapon? Undecided. Do I enjoy watching her act tough and cynical and be the lead of an action movie? Definitely. I don’t think it’s the type of war movie that’s trying to say something thoughtful about geopolitics. It’s the type where at the beginning the hero takes an anguished shower, revealing her scars and giant phoenix back tattoo as she broods.

Travis (Christopher Backus, ROGUE HOSTAGE) is the old CIA friend who recruits her. She acts like she hates him but deep down she has respect for him. That he gives her a passport in the name “Jessica Rabit” just to fuck with her is the first sign that this won’t be as relentlessly gloomy as many movies in this setting. The bits of quirkiness (like that one of their Pakistani drivers is said to be in a really good cover band and love Steppenwolf) create an unwieldy tone at times, but for the most part they make it go down easier while setting you up to feel it more when something heavy occurs. There’s a death of a cool supporting character that actually hurts. Without the levity I’m not sure it would register.

Jake meets up with the team at a safe house and asks to be told their specialties, not their fake names. They are Shooter (Emily Bruni, TAMARA DREWE), Geek (Jojo T. Gibbs, PAST LIVES), Medic (Ruby Rose, THE DOORMAN), The Bomb (Maria Bakalova, BODIES BODIES BODIES), plus badass mechanic Rocky (Rona-Lee Shimon, BLACK LOTUS) and local guides Abbas (Aziz Çapkurt) and Malik (Reza Brojerdi, WITHOUT REMORSE, BOY KILLS WORLD). I was excited to see Rose and Bakalova’s names on the box, and both are endearing in their parts, but I wouldn’t say they’re fully utilized. Rose plays against type, just a nice and upbeat lady, introduced zipping up her pants after not-at-all-secretly fucking Dr. Mike (Edmund Kingsley, “Young Freddie,” FREDDIE AS F.R.O.7) in the next room. Not sure what that was about. Bakalova is fun as the upbeat lover of explosions, it just seems like she doesn’t do that much for an Oscar nominee who’s not just guest starring but sticking around as part of the ensemble. But it really doesn’t feel like there’s enough time to develop any of the team members as much as I’d like.

No one trusts Jake much, because they’ve heard she killed her superior and was the only survivor of the team. She has the kind of fuck-you attitude where she doesn’t bother to explain that they forced her to stone her friend and the same was about to happen to her when American soldiers pulled her into a helicopter and refused to go back for the others. She’s innocent! But she keeps it to herself.

She has a contact inside the Taliban (Laëtitia Eïdo, CHIEF OF STATION) who she believes in despite ideological differences – I think maybe they had a thing once. The Taliban and ISIS are two different factions of bad guys to contend with while sneaking into the country disguised as aid workers, trying to find out where the hostages are hidden and steal weapons to rescue them with. Meanwhile, the Afghan minister of education (Esti Yerushalmi, SCHINDLER’S LIST), whose daughter Badia (May Kurtz) is one of the hostages, tries to get them to pay a ransom for her. It’s a messy conflict.

Early on it struck me as cheap for a Martin Campbell movie, since I’m pretty sure they did a whole helicopter rescue with only digital helicopters. But it’s enormous compared to the VOD movies this type of story usually ends up as, and has a wide variety of well executed action. There’s an adrenaline pumping scene where Rocky slides a motorcycle under a bus to stop it but gets stuck in the undercarriage. I’m actually not sure I even interpreted what was going on correctly but I love the randomness of her accident and I got caught up in the melodrama and the horror of having to wait there to be captured. Jake tells her to just say she’s American, they’ll let her live and negotiate a trade. It’ll blow the team’s cover but they’ll be long gone, she says. Rocky pretends to agree.

Despite having plenty of innocent and heroic Muslim/Arab characters in the movie, if you do a pulpy action movie about this topic it ends up promoting stereotypes that seem to implicitly justify the war. These are good movie bad guys, based on real world bad guys, but in a country my country bombed and occupied for 20 years. Which was bad! So I’m uncomfortable with movies like this, but sometimes they work, because we can all agree that ISIS and the Taliban suck.

The initial attack on the school is a particularly effective sequence. We follow a group of girls who were smoking in the restroom when it happened. (I like those moments that show our cultures aren’t as different as we sometimes think.) They try to hide on the roof, with very upsetting results. Those dicks really can’t stand women getting an education. Later, when Rocky is captured, they question her gender, like American conservatives would. They’re just trying to defend women’s sports, which they have always cherished and supported so passionately, you remember. It was like, always their main thing – season tickets, everything.

Anyway, the obvious appeal here is that it’s fun to see these assholes whose trademark is oppression of women get outsmarted and outgunned by a group of women, who they can’t help but underestimate. It’s not the sharpest or tightest version of that premise, but I found it more entertaining than many lowbrow military action movies I’ve tried.

Campbell shares a story credit with Jonas McCord (MALICE), who wrote the screenplay with Alissa Sullivan Haggis (story assistant for CASINO ROYALE). Many press release-based articles (but not the poster or IMDb) mention Gene Quintano as a writer. If it’s the same one who starred in COMIN’ AT YA! and wrote POLICE ACADEMY 3, SUDDEN DEATH and THE MUSKETEER then that’s crazy because he hasn’t done a movie since FUNKY MONKEY twenty years ago. Actually, it’s gotta be him because Moshe Diamant produced this and three of those I just listed. They must’ve rewritten one of his old scripts to fit more recent events. So let me suggest some new advertising copy:

FROM THE MAKERS OF CASINO ROYALE AND POLICE ACADEMY 3…