ALL flying kicks and hair flicks, Charlie's Angels was a kitsch Seventies' TV classic with an impact way beyond its 'artistic merits'. Those angel delights teased boys with fantasy foxy sleuths and brought the first flash of girl power with its supergirl heroines.

It was neither calculating, nor cynical, just out to have fun in the days before Tank Girl and Tomb Raider's Lara Croft.

These are more knowing, self-referential movie times, when so much is delivered with a wink, and so the all new, all-Drew Charlie's Angels has one retro foot in the Seventies, the other in the 21st century of The Matrix.

Executive producer Drew Barrymore and film director McG both celebrate and send up the original, as is the "post-ironic" vogue, even if Charlie's Angels, the ultra-camp movie, fatally never decides which should hold sway.

The film opens with its own Jane Bond take on the James Bond pre-credit sequence, an aircraft drama in which the in-flight movie is T J Hooker - The Movie. This affords the in-joke comment from a passenger: "Not another film of an old TV series". It is the best gag here, and you wish for more like it.

In place of Farrah Fawcett-Majors, Jaclyn Smith and Kate Jackson - none of them familiar to we Brits at the time - come three familiar new feisty crime fighters, former wild child Drew Barrymore, as no-nonsense cop Dylan; blonde goddess Cameron Diaz as the kooky, ace-driving Natalie and Ally McBeal Asian beauty Lucy Liu as the ice-cool champion horsewoman Alex.

The names have changed, and so have the fashions, but the lip gloss and the lip, the kicks and the quips, the put-downs and the knock-downs are still present, and so is the skimpiest of plots involving the angels on a mission to rescue a kidnap victim.

As before, the girls favour martial arts over guns, and indulge in every opportunity to dress up or down, flashing almost as much cleavage as Pamela Anderson in Barb Wire. The problem, however, lies in Charlie's Angels' giggling, silly desperation to please yet to be hip too. It tries just that little bit too hard, with former pop video director McG becoming over-excited when parading his visual trickery and showing no sense of comic timing. The best performance comes from Bill Murray, as Charlie's go-between Bosley, a droll, cool turn that plays to its own rules.

He alone gets the comic tone right. The rest of them take not taking it seriously far too seriously.