The refashioned Angel World is a California of scorching blues and oranges, a place where three skilled young women who resemble Bond girls (but play like Bond himself) help take a bite out of crime. Ever-loyal to a boss they've never met, thanks in part to Bosley (Bill Murray), the boss' gentle buffoon of an aide, detectives Dylan (Barrymore), Natalie (Cameron Diaz), and Alex (Lucy Liu) have come up against someone almost as powerful as Charlie in their latest assignment, an investigation of tycoon Roger Corwin (Tim Curry). Hair-flipping ensues.

On television, "Charlie's Angels" ran for one hour per week, so it's fitting that 'act three' of its big-screen adaptation runs on fumes. That's about all I can say to the discredit of Charlie's Angels with any fervour. It's not a brilliant film, but it achieves things: distinguished (if immature), inoffensive heroines; action that's not run-of-the-mill; a gymnastic villain (Crispin Glover) worthy of the description "comic book"; a nuanced supporting cast, and more. There are times when I'm powerless to resist photogenic camp, and Charlie's Angels is one of them.

Stirred in with those artifacts from the original show are incongruous licks that render this Charlie's Angels even more retro-playful than a satiric time warp like The Brady Bunch Movie. Director McG (nee Joseph McGinty Nichol), a child of the eighties who made rock videos in the nineties, achieves a vision in which the kitsch of the past three decades lives together in harmony. The colour scheme is very now, while the plot could've been shot out of a Cannon picture--as with Drew Barrymore's "Little Girl Lost"-era outfit (seen briefly in montage after the film's prologue), pure eighties cheese. If the sum total also provokes a kind of phantom nostalgia, at least it (surprisingly) coheres. At least it provokes.

Columbia Tri-Star's Charlie's Angels: Special Edition DVD is sensational. It all starts with a high-gloss, 16x9-enhanced, 2.35:1 video presentation of ripe saturation and razor-sharp (yet edgeless) detail. I smell an Imaging Science Foundation (ISF) certification in this transfer's future. (A minor flaw of blooming reds is more than forgivable.) The English Dolby Digital 5.1 mix is a well-matched stunner, though neither Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" nor the showpiece explosions sink to expected depths. Surround information is dizzying in the best way, notably during the opening silhouette logo and a racetrack showdown between Natalie and Glover's "Creepy Thin Man".

If I could change one aspect of this disc, I would add a "play all" option to the included featurettes, since I viewed them in a long stretch, anyway. These mini-docs run about five minutes each, starting with "Getting G'd Up", a tribute to (or, in Murray's case, a roast for) Nichol himself, a man for whom decaf should be enforced. Set design, costume design, and stunts are also covered, the latter in two shorts: the first contains interview footage with martial arts choreographer Cheung-Yan Yuen, the second an unaltered fight scene that, for the presence of wires and its production sound, is worth a dozen film school classes.

McG introduces a trio of deleted scenes (in one, Murray and Curry play "Marco Polo"!), and the film's closing credit sequence is repeated, sans intertitles, under "outtakes and bloopers". "Independent Women Part 1" and "Charlie's Angels 2000," songs of Destiny's Child and Apollo Four Forty, respectively, are featured music videos; talent files, trailers (Charlie's Angels (teaser and standard); Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; My Best Friend's Wedding; Vertical Limit; Final Fantasy; and The Adventures of Joe Dirt), production notes, and a booklet leave this one to heaven. Don't think I've forgotten to mention McG and Carpenter's commentary--I saved the best for last: in citing such films as Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and Mission: Impossible, McG betrays a limited frame of reference, but his track inspires us to go out and shoot something (preferably with a Technicrane, according to Carpenter, McG's toy of choice) all the same.-Bill Chambers