Dirty Angels Review: Eva Green Wants Revenge

Martin Campbell’s Dirty Angels is a competently made and suspenseful actioner starring the always compelling Eva Green.

I do believe he is extremely talented, and I’ve been a fan of his work for quite a while now, but there’s no denying that his filmography is rather spotty.

This is why I approached Dirty Angels with some trepidation. Would it be something more akin to his better efforts, or would it end up being an interesting failure? Well, the end result is somewhere in the middle. This film is full of the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. When it works, it works, and manages to show that Campbell is still capable of directing the hell out of an action scene. But when it doesn’t, it feels like what it is: a B-grade action thriller that, despite featuring an interesting and talented cast, is being given an extremely limited theatrical run for a reason. I was entertained by Dirty Angels, but also a tad frustrated by its wasted potential.

As the movie starts, we see that American soldier Jake (Eva Green, of Proxima) is about to be stoned to death by a group of terrorists in the Middle East. She eventually gets saved, but not without some casualties, including most of the team that accompanied her to her latest mission. Some months later, she is recruited by Travis (Christopher Backus) for a new mission that will allow her to take revenge on the person who killed her men: Taliban leader Afhsin (Hadi Khanjanpour). It turns out he has kidnapped a bunch of girls from a school in Pakistan, and is asking for millions of dollars as ransom from the American government.

Clearly, the Americans aren’t willing to pay the money, even if the daughter of an ex-Pakistani minister is amongst the kidnapped girls. Thus, Jake is sent to Pakistan to work alongside a team of mostly female soldiers to rescue the kids. Maria Bakalova plays an explosives expert; Ruby Rose is the team’s medic; Rona-Lee Shimon is the shooter, and Jojo T. Gibbs is in charge of tech. Additionally, Jake reunites with Travis in Pakistan and also ends up working with an actual doctor who has been living in the country for a while, Mike (Edmund Kingsley). With their help and the support of local drivers Abbas (Aziz Çapkurt) and Malik (Reza Brojerdi), she will try her best to fulfil the mission, even if she has to deal with a civil war between the Taliban and ISIS.

Rather predictably, Dirty Angels takes a very Americentric stance on the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. Most of the film’s protagonists are American (even if not all the actors portraying them are), and the Middle Eastern characters (both villains and allies) are pretty stereotypical. So, if you were expecting something a tad more complex, you won’t get it here. Most people don’t watch an actioner like this for its nuanced politics, though. What Dirty Angels does is to use the context in which it takes place to develop a narrative about redemption and regret, and of course, to show us a couple of sweet explosions and many a shootout.

And in that sense, Dirty Angels is competent enough. Action-wise, Campbell manages to convey tension through fluid camerawork, impressive stunts, and a palpable sense of mortality for his main characters. Jake might be protected by Plot Armour, but the rest of her team are vulnerable enough, so much so that Campbell manages to extract quite a bit of suspense out of generic shootouts and fisticuffs. Where the film fails, though, is in the VFX department. There’s nothing horrible, especially if the viewer is aware that they’re not watching a big-budget blockbuster, but Dirty Angels does feature unconvincing digital fireballs, dreadful digital blood, and a shot of a CGI helicopter that would look at home in a video game. Thankfully, they’re not bad enough to be completely distracting.

What sets Dirty Angels apart from any old direct-to-streaming action picture, though, is the character of Jake. Of course the film has the advantage of having Eva Green portraying her, but the script (credited to four writers, including Campbell) also does a good job of developing her as a credible human being. She could have ended up being an archetypal “strong woman”, but both the script and Green turn her into someone looking for redemption and a purposeful life. Jake lives with the guilt of having abandoned her team to be killed and thus refuses to let anyone die during her new mission. Her character arc is interesting enough, and the way Jake regains her humanity as the story advances turns her into someone worth supporting.

The secondary characters, though, aren’t as interesting. Most of them lack personality and are identifiable only because some of them are portrayed by recognisable stars, like Maria Bakalova or Ruby Rose. The exceptions are Aziz Çapkurt’s Abbas and Reza Brojerdi’s Malik. They are the only allies Jake’s team have in Pakistan, and instead of being treated as disposable “Red Shirts”, they are portrayed as believable humans, with their own wants and needs and funny quirks. Abbas is a terrible driver and a great singer, for example, and Malik loves his big brother very much. It’s not extraordinary character work, to be exact, but it helps to make most of the interactions between the drivers and Jake feel less clichéd.

Dirty Angels is a competent action thriller directed by a filmmaker incapable of making anything less than “fine”. Yes, VFX quality is all over the place, and the film’s politics are either simplified or pretty stereotypical and Americentric. But if one decides to watch Dirty Angels without expecting anything extraordinary, it is possible to have fun with it. Most action scenes are tense, there’s not one bad performance to be found (Eva Green is great, as usual), and Jake’s character arc is what gives the movie its edge. If you’re in the mood for watching a suspenseful actioner that doesn’t demand too much from the viewer, you could do much worse than Martin Campbell’s Dirty Angels.

Dirty Angels will be released in select US theaters, on digital and on demand on December 13, 2024.

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