Dirty Angels ★★★

FRENCH actress Eva Green has a great time playing a hard-as-nails soldier in the American action thriller Dirty Angels.

Green is one of the actresses who is always very watchable but never seems to choose, or get, that one great role that will take her to stardom.

Mostly recently she made a dashing villainess in the two-film remake of The Three Musketeers.

When Dirty Angels opens, she appears far from glamorous, locked in a cage and about to be murdered by terrorists.

As luck would have it, a rescue team arrives by helicopter to save her character ‘Jake’ from being stoned to death.

The rest of her team aren’t so lucky and a continuing plot point throughout the first two acts is whether Jake can be trusted to have her comrades’ backs or whether she will always put the mission and self-survival first.

A group of terrorists storms a girls’ school in Afghanistan and take dozens of students hostage including the daughters of the country’s Minister of Education and the American Ambassador.

After one rescue attempt fails, Jake is call up to lead a group of all-female soldiers who will infiltrate the area undercover as medical personnel.

It’s all pretty standard stuff and probably goes the way you expect, but the energy amongst the cast and quality of the action, particular the explosions, lifts it above average for a modestly budgeted film.

The director is Kiwi Martin Cambell who has been around for quite a while now. His main claim to fame is helming two Bond movies – Golden Eye in 1995 and Casino Royale in 2006 – so he knows his way around an action sequence.

Watched on Apple TV.