PROS: It was the girls; wanting to see Cameron, Drew and Lucy is no crime

CONS: Weak plot, stupid dialogue, too much slow-mo FX

By now, unless you were living under a proverbial media rock, you've probably heard that the new Charlie's Angels movie has been roundly trashed by all of the professional critics, and with good reason. Well, let's not play that game, especially since I am no professional in this area, except to offer this tattered, old bromide: garbage in, garbage out. If you base a movie on what was essentially a cheesy television show from the 70s, the same decade that gave us The Love Boat, Three's Company, and Chico and the Man, then what do you expect to get, Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights? Paul Scofield in A Man For All Seasons? Come on now, you know better, you ought to expect the late Jim Varney in Ernest: Scared Stupid ... but that's just you.

Well, what you get in this movie is Cameron Diaz, Lucy Liu, and Drew Barrymore, bonafide babes for sure, in the closest thing you'll ever get to a live-action version of The Powerpuff Girls. Only that comparison does a disservice to the cartoon, which is much better.

Forget about a compelling storyline: this one is pure, TV-style pabulum. It's corny, predictable and contrived. It's the kind of plot that -- since I'm already comparing this movie to cartoons -- you'd expect to see in Scooby Doo. It's the kind of plot where the villains catch the good guys -- or in this case girls -- tie them up, torture them with bad dialogue and pained expressions, and then just before killing them pontificate on every sordid detail of their fiendish plot. And then when they finally get around to the "killing" part, these villains never check to make sure they've done the deed. Instead they do something like blow Drew Barrymore's character through the plate glass balcony window of the Hollywood Hills home they've sequestered her at, and take off in their cars like no one's ever going to notice the presumably dead body rotting at the bottom of the canyon, just down the hill from their aired-out livingroom window. Yeah right. What will the neighbors say?

But in a way, that's the charm of this movie: it's so bad that it's good. It's so unfunny that it's brilliantly comic and unintentionally hilarious. And unlike another recent actioner that I trashed right here -- MI2 -- this one doesn't take itself very seriously, which is one of its few redeeming qualities. So when the comic-book, slo-mo/fast-mo Kung Fu sequences happen -- and they are legion -- you almost can see the tongue-in-cheek. But then you start to wonder: who's tongue is this? Who's cheek is that?

If you're on the budget plan, my suggestion is that you wait for this one on video. I deliberately avoided the pre-release reviews because I desperately wanted to will this movie into being good; it's been such a lame year for movies, this Year 2000. Since I went in with low expectations, and I wasn't disappointed. But just makes you wonder where all of the money in this big-budget bomb went, because it certainly doesn't show up on the screen.

And one last thing, Tom Green is not funny ... in this movie. He's just kind of thrown in as an afterthought. (Yes, it was the "Chad.") How this guy is actually dating Drew Barrymore in real life is mind-boggling, but then it gives normal guys hope everywhere. On the other hand, perhaps we have a new barometer for predicting movie quality: if Tom Green is in the movie, it will stink.

Angels, you have been briefed.