This makes her the opposite of Lucy Liu, who has plenty of poise and relatively little personality. Her skill is too physical, her manner ultimately too reserved. She often seems to be peeking out at us from behind her face. Physical skills aren't enough; the performer has to engage us more than Liu seems interested in to register as a star. Diaz is a great big gushing firehose of personality, and Barrymore has the gift of being herself, helplessly, onscreen in a way that's awfully engaging--it doesn't matter if the actress comes to us or beckons us to her. Liu isn't bad, but she merely plays the part as written, which puts her at the bottom of this class.

But the willful dopiness of the movie carries Liu along with everything else. The movie's attitude is just about perfect, but this doesn't make it a masterpiece. I wish the musical numbers were longer and more fully worked out. Once you've thrown believability away there's no reason not to pause for a good dance routine, and the angels can dance. Bernie Mac's material isn't fresh and is awkwardly cut in, while John Cleese's scenes as Liu's father, in which he hears everything she says as dismaying double entendres and tries to show his support for her anyway, verge on the queasy. (I missed Bill Murray from the first movie, a master of undermining his own projects from within, and Luke Wilson contributed some off-rhythm moments. Dropping Tom Green was a good move, however.) The special effects are standard, and the no-rules Motocross race in particular looks like a color Xerox of a TV cartoon made in defiance of a low toner warning. The fight scenes are as absurd as everything else, but there's only so much camp can do. As McG says in this interview about the making of the movie, the fights were choreographed by Yuen Cheung-Yan, the Hong Kong martial arts movie veteran who also worked on the first Charlie's Angels, Daredevil (2003), and The Matrix Reloaded (2003). Yuen's work is pretty much a waste because the fights have been cut to incoherence. The comedy, by contrast, is timed a little slow--McG is by turns hare and tortoise just when he shouldn't be.

In other words, there are a lot of skills that McG has yet to learn (or perhaps to hear about--even in a purposely anarchic comedy you miss a director with a literary or any kind of narrative-theatrical background). His extraordinary work in video has enabled him to jump way ahead of himself as a movie director and he's getting by on attitude. But, considering how unappealing the more conventionally competent action movies at the mall are to me, at least he is getting by in Full Throttle.