But they also get to be more femme. Sure, the original Angels came frosted with pounds of hairspray and lip gloss. But they have nothing on these new girls, who demonstrate their pussy power by vamping, mocking and altering their femininity at will. They wear wigs and makeup, serve up cleavage like a meal and display their asses like plumage. They wake up in men's beds. And this in no way diminishes their credibility as crime fighters or their likability as characters. They play to an audience that gets it, that understands that straight women appreciate other women's bodies (I was riveted by the sight of Diaz unzipping her wet suit to her navel), that sex workers and sluts deserve some respect and that there is nothing wrong with being a sex object if your objective is to have sex. These girls are definitely looking back in something other than anger, and winking too.

The best thing about "Charlie's Angels" is how liberally it steals from two clichés: the male action hero and the Hollywood vixen. It's like fusing GI Joe and Barbie.

This movie is targeted, like a heat-seeking missile straddled by a pinup girl (an image mocked by Lucy Liu, who straddles a heat-seeking missile toward the end of the movie), straight at the chicks who grew up in the '70s; it's loaded with '70s schtick: lip gloss, jumpsuits, baseball shirts, a soundtrack that resurrects disco and Juice Newton. Cameron Diaz even gets a cameo on "Soul Train."

Here's the thing: Many of us girls (well me and many girls that I know) have been reading boy stuff for years. We played with Star Wars action figures and video games and read comic books and watched "their" after-school programs and the "Dukes of Hazzard." We also played with Barbies and watched "Wonder Woman" and "Charlie's Angels" and traded nail polish. We were the daughters of Second Wave feminists, and for the most part, we had parents who encouraged us to play with boys' toys. It's just that we couldn't get the boys to play with ours. So we learned both parts.

"Charlie's Angels" is one girl toy that the boys definitely will want to play with. In fact, boys and girls both think this movie is aimed at them: In a recent Chicago Tribune column, writers Mary Scmich and Eric Zorn debated the question of whether or not "Angels" was a chick flick (Scmich: "It's one big self-aware, sexy wink. It's cleavage as camp") or a dude flick (Zorn: "It's a cross between an action comic book and Maxim magazine. Guys will be taken ... with ... the numerous shots of the rear ends of the female stars").

But this movie defies gender identification. If Zorn is looking at the rear ends, he does so at his own risk. There is no question that these girls are babes, but anyone who is blinded by their cleavage had better be prepared for their karate chops. In fact, men who are lured in by sexiness and taken out as sexist are the revolving joke of the movie: The girls dress as geishas to fleece a computer mogul, as belly dancers to collect fingerprints, as singing-telegram Swiss lasses to obtain a retinal scan.

At one point the villain (who has screwed Barrymore's character, literally and figuratively) offers his henchmen a bit of "angel cake" in the form of a bound Barrymore. She spreads her legs in a suggestive V to stop them in their tracks and then proceeds to describe in a flirtatious, girlish voice just exactly how she's going to dispose of them. Then she does -- striking poses and concluding with, "And that's kicking your ass." She does this all with her hands, literally, tied behind her back. (As for the paramour, well, he's taken care of: She kills him.)

(Vastly different interpretations of this scene are possible -- and have been made. Anthony Lane, for example, wrote in the New Yorker that he was troubled by the "rape fantasy" suggested by Barrymore's stopping the action with implied action. Maybe it's a question of where you insert yourself into the fantasy.)

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