THE stunts are bigger, the clothes skimpier, the plot twice as daft, and Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle is even more of an Angel delight in the crime-busting, bust-thrusting company of Cameron Diaz, Lucy Liu and Drew Barrymore.

Where The Matrix series takes itself very seriously, Charlie's Angels director McG - the name is as snappy as his movies - knows his duty is to make fast, mindless, tongue-in-cheek, butt-kicking fun with eye candy as sweet as a knickerbocker glory.

So, you want Diaz in white fur coat and whiter long stockings, riding an electronic yak? You got it, in the opening credit sequence, in a rescue operation in Mongolia at the outset of a flimsy, frenetic story involving the retrieval of a pair of rings containing all the FBI's witness protection programme profiles.

The comic-strip, male-fantasy action-girl thrills of Full Throttle are sexy, funny and noisy, if fast forgotten. Hormone-raging young men may think Diaz, 31, Liu, 35, and Barrymore, 28, are too old, but they are a deliciously guilty pleasure for the older man who has a thing for independent women and still feels nostalgic for the television generation of Angels. (Original Angel Jaclyn Smith pops up, shiny as an apple at 56, to make him feel even better).

Friday night girls too will lap up the flashing, furious, yet trashy action, as crime gangs are reduced to pulp or weak joke fodder (John Cleese, Matt Le Blanc) in the face of pulchritude with attitude.

Full Throttle doesn't try to move Charlie's Angels forward: the Seventies kitsch, the bubblegum camp and the absurdity of boss Charlie taking the disembodied form of a speaker box were all retained by pop video graduate McG in 2000's first movie spin-off, and he does so again while sending up Terminator 2 and Seventies' dance movies and apeing the slow-motion fight ballet of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the Wachowski brothers' Matrix movies.

The plot merely serves a series of elaborate, humorously played Barbie doll set pieces: different hair, make-up and clothes for every action scene as the dynamic trio take on the guises of nuns, surfing honeys, ship welders and crime scene investigators. They get to ride motorbikes, fly helicopters... and clash with Demi Moore.

If Liu's gymnastic, chess-playing genius, Barrymore's rock babe and, in particular Diaz's dancing party animal, look a little too desperate to tease and please at times, that is nothing by comparison with Moore on the comeback trail. Move over Joan Crawford and Norma Desmond.

Playing the villainous Angel Madison Lee without a hint of humour, there are no half measures from Demi as she strips to her undies at every opportunity, and no line has been delivered with more feeling than "I wasn't good. I was great".

No, less would be Moore, dear, but thanks for the unintentional laughs.

Updated: 10:01 Friday, July 04, 2003