July 29, 2001|By David Zurawik | David Zurawik,Sun Television Critic
LOS ANGELES -- One is a double agent for the CIA. Another is a professional thief forced to work for the police after being arrested during a failed heist. Another yet is an undercover agent who loves the feel of an automatic weapon firing red-hot in her hands.
They are the new, kung-fu kicking, young women of prime time, coming to a television screen near you this fall. Taken together with Max (Jessica Alba), of Fox's Dark Angel, and Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar), of UPN's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, network television is going to be populated by young, leather-clad, female action adventure heroes like never before.
To find the prototype, see the 1991 feature film La Femme Nikita, with a few new wrinkles from the 1999 German-made Run, Lola, Run. Or go back to the days of Charlie's Angels, the ABC TV series of the 1970s, and you are within deadly range of the mother of all keister-kicking heroines, Emma Peel of the 1960s series The Avengers. This summer's big-screen version is Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, with Angelina Jolie; last fall, it was Charlie's Angels, the movie.
"My take on this phenomenon is that it's a little bit of empowerment mixed in with lots of savvy marketing to an increasingly fragmented television audience," said Dr. Suzanna Walters, chair of the Women's Studies Department at Georgetown University.
"Throw in a dash of illicit, soft-core 'cat fights,' and you've got yourself a pop-culture trend. I think the interesting question to ask is to what extent these female action heroes are aided and abetted by all-knowing male, Pygmalion types," she added.
Indeed, all of the new prime-time warriors not only work for or report to men, but are also created by men.
Confused, but tough
In ABC's Alias, Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) appears to be controlled by so many men it is hard to keep track of all of them in the wildly illogical but absolutely dazzling pilot. The show is from J.J. Abrams, who created Felicity for the WB, wrote the feature film Forever Young, and produced The Pallbearer.
Sydney is a graduate student who also works full time as an agent for SD-6, a top-secret division of what she thinks is the CIA. She was recruited as an alienated undergraduate "who fit the profile." When we meet her, she is about to marry a young doctor. Her mother's dead, and she's estranged from her father, who she thinks is in the airplane parts business.
Before the two-hour pilot ends, her fiance will be butchered in her bathtub for learning of her secret life, while she takes on an Asian terrorist group in an overseas embassy. And, oh yeah, she's on the run from the very branch of the CIA for which she thought she was working.
The men pulling all the strings in her life include: Sloan (Ron Rifkin), head of SD-6, who orders the hit on her boyfriend and then on her; her father (Victor Garber), who looks to be a double agent himself rather than a parts dealer; and Vaughn (Michael Vartan), the operations officer at the CIA to whom she reports.
Onscreen, who and what she's fighting for can get a little confusing, but, yikes, can she fight. I'm no fan of violence, but I have to admit being mesmerized by an underground garage scene in which she's fighting for her life against a couple of goonball hit men. It ends with her kicking a guy about three times her size in the face and driving his head through the passenger-door window of a parked car. The camera shoots the scene from inside the car. Here, let me help you with that door, little lady.
Again with the door
The kicked-in car window is also used in the pilot for ABC's Thieves, starring Melissa George and John Stamos as master thieves forced to work for the U.S. government recovering (as in stealing back) national treasures and artifacts. She's Rita, he's Johnny.
As the press kit describes her: "Rita is high-tech brass and nerve; she's all about sophisticated gadgets, explosives and shoot-from-the-hip first, ask questions later."
Her car-window scene comes when Johnny locks the keys inside the getaway car and starts arguing with her about it as he fumbles with the lock. She ends the argument with a flying, 180-degree kick.
With her blond hair pulled back into a chignon, George looks a bit like a young Grace Kelly. But even in a film like 1954's Rear Window, with her boyfriend in a wheelchair, it was still the male who provided the ultimate rescue for the Kelly heroine.
This is Grace Kelly for the new millennium -- all high-teched and leathered-up -- in need of no rescue by Johnny, though still under the control of her male handlers in the FBI.
Agent of change
Alex Cross, the federal undercover agent on NBC's UC: Undercover, also reports to a male group leader. Vera Farmiga, the actress who plays her, said she still finds it an empowering role.
"It's my turn to play Donnie Brasco instead of Donnie Brasco's wife," Farmiga said, referring to the 1997 mob film. "It's a chance for me as a woman to play the undercover agent."
