Anjos do Deserto

Jake (Eva Green) is a U. S. Army Ranger still dealing with the fallout from having been forced to abandon her team during the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. When ISIS storms a girls school in Pakistan and takes hostage several teenage daughters of high ranking officials, Jake is assigned to lead a team of mostly female soldiers masquerading as a NGO medical relief effort in order to find out where the hostages are being kept and rescue them.

Dirty Angels comes to us from independent production company Millennium Media, a company whose foundation ties back to 80s Cannon Films and has worked their way up from producing direct-to-video films to more mainstream fare like The Expendables and Has Fallen series. Dirty Angels comes to us from noted action director Martin Campbell (of Goldeneye and Casino Royale fame) and marks his second time working for Millennium following his assassin film The Protege with Maggie Q. With a low key VOD release Dirty Angels has more production polish than you'd typically expect from this kind of film, but a script that isn't able to pick a tone leads to a rather turgid affair.

In keeping with the company's Cannon lineage, Dirty Angels doesn't really have any aspirations on Afghanistan, ISIS, or the Taliban other than using them as interchangeable goons that are cannon fodder for our protagonists. While the withdrawal from Afghanistan has yielded plenty of media trying to tap into the prescience of the event, the movie lacks the emotional core of The Covenant or the intricate details of Kandahar and instead feels like a crude redress of 80s relics like Missing in Action or other Vietnam War "this time we win" revisionist fantasies that were so popular during the Reagan administration. Despite the cast featuring some good actors like Eva Green, Marla Bakalova, and Jojo T. Gibbs, their characterization is very flat down to the fact the movie insists on knowing them more by their roles like "Medic", "Shooter", "The Bomb" and etc. Rather than actual names. Honestly the most likable characters are two local brothers named Abbas and Malik played by Aziz Capkurt and Reza Brojerdi respectively who mainly serve as comic relief foils to Jake, but as a result they're the most endearing and likable ones in the movie because we actually get to know them beyond their role in the mission.

In terms of action, Martin Campbell has shown himself time and again that he's a reliable staple of the genre and is comfortable behind the camera framing spectacle (Legend of Zorro and Green Lantern notwithstanding). While Campbell doesn't escape unscathed from Millennium's budget scissors (such as some shockingly bad CGI blood in one scene) for the most part he still shows that he knows how to frame an action sequence even at 80+ years old. Unfortunately despite the action being decent, Dirty Angels' lack of commitment to a tone ends up making it all for not and it becomes a rather dull ride that just isn't engaging. While the opening with its brutal stoning sequence and the ISIS attack on the girls school feel like they're aiming for something heavy and serious, other sequences involving the characters showing off laconic swagger or a running gag of Jake's alias being "Jessica Rabit" (pronounced ra-beet) create a distracting tonal clash that never meshes into a fully formed vision. With a name like Dirty Angels and some of the humor on display you get the sense the film wanted to play itself more trashier and with a more exploitative edge than it actually wanted to, but coupled with the lip service to real world events just makes the film feel like a misfire.

Dirty Angels ranks as one of Campbell's lesser entries in his career and despite the action being decently handled (albeit with Millennium's typical quick and cheap mindset) the film doesn't come together into a cohesive whole as it's too glib to make any sort of statement on the real world events it focuses on while also being to leaden and overly serious to make for entertaining exploitation.

Whoever the military advisor was should be fired. I retired from the Marines and the uniforms and medals and everything to do with the military in this movie was not just wrong but it was comedic . Eva Green tried to carry it which is the only reason i watched it. I would have done the advising for free I and all other vets are tired of the movies getting it wrong! The overseas filming makes it out to be much better than it really is like the young women playing and sports and the few guards in a taliban area at all. I understand its a movie but some realism goes a long way with making the movie better.

Eva Green is one of those actresses that I will watch in almost anything. She was fantastic in Casino Royale and Miss Peregrine but since then her best roles have been in french movies like D'Artagnan. She still performs admirably in what is a very basic action movie.

There really is nothing new with this movie. Basic action scenes, girls trying to tough guys and some very bad dialogue. If this movie featured men it would've have Dolph Lundgren as the lead and a couple of UFC fighters in the rest of the cast.

Ruby Rose... in over ten years of acting she has not improved at all. In fact, I would say she has gotten worse. I know a lot of famous actors have made it on their looks only or by using 2 different facial expressions but it just doesn't work for her.

Somewhere deep underneath all the inexplicable absurdity, there is a brilliant comedy that wants to get out.

I am really struggling to understand what this movie tries to be. Let's gently set aside the brief CGI atrocities, the over-the-top-tropes, the obvious girlboss pandering, horrible & at times hilariously nonsensical dialogue, inconsequential character decisions & interactions, lackluster drama, laughable gunplay & tactics & the disgustingly flirtatious & ultimately nihilistic take on violence, victimhood & resolve.

Honestly, I was really hoping for the late Leslie Nielsen to pop up, wearing a tuxedo. Or a half naked Charlie Sheen, dual wielding RPG7s.

There is not one single solitary likeable character, including Eva Green, who not only can't move, let alone run, but also seems to have forgotten how to act, maybe as a courtesy to the rest of the cast.

I'm giving this pile of utterly pointless contrivance a 3/10 out of respect for the multiple efficient usage of one single, half-assed Humvee that gets blown up somewhere in the middle of the movie & yet is used throughout the whole production. He was a good boy.

The only reason this movie got two-stars is because it manages to equally insult every nationality depicted, and because it has Eva Green and Ruby Rose, among other promising actresses.

Eva Green: I read that she wants to return to theater. Ok, but maybe have your agent find better projects. I don't understand why she ever agreed to do this awful film. It was such a miscast.

Ruby Rose: As an actress she's best suited for the sarcastic, tough character roles, and so it's perplexing that here she gets a different role which doesn't really suit her specific, narrow-ranged talents.

Pretty much everything with this move is bad. Both Martin Cambell (director) and Jonas McCord (writer) should be ashamed of themselves. Alissa Sullivan Haggis (writer), too. Atrocious.