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Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle is the greatest movie ever made, and I know because I have seen obscure classics like The Bodyguard and that movie with Dustin Hoffman where he's good at math. It has no brains, no suspense, no story, no shirts, a lot of shoes. And yet it's no problem. It is, rather, an unequivocal laying down of the arms of coherence and attention span, and the embrace of more, more, and Moore. (As in Demi.) Children on Ritalin should consult a doctor before seeing. For everyone else: Y chromosomes, Powerpuff wannabes, the brains behind 2 Fast 2 Furious and Bruce Almighty and any other summer movie that let a lot of plot stand in the way of a pop overdose - bust out the sun block. Let's go slumming.

Cameron Diaz is smiling again.

Also, leaping from an exploding truck into a falling helicopter, and dancing up a storm to Donna Summer, and dodging bullets, and surfing, and soaking in a giant martini glass. Drew Barrymore is driving a monster truck, and professional wrestling, and being told by Jaclyn Smith, who appears out of a ray of light like Obi-Wan in Sassoon, "Angels are like diamonds; they aren't made." Lucy Liu is bursting through the roof of a warehouse, corkscrewing upwards, kicking a plank of wood into place, and riding it like a surfboard down a taut rope.

Oh, and Demi can fly.

Who has time for taste? I could pretend to be above it all, to wring my hands, but there's a place in our world for trashy soft-core triviality, and Cameron Diaz washing a car in a bikini in slow motion. I could also say it would be nice if that kind of movie merely had a place in our world rather than became our world (which it has) - but heck, this one at least wore me down.

Intoxicated on its own charm and absurdity, it doesn't have time to be campy - that requires cynicism. The first Charlie's Angels film was a novelty, a winking remake of a lousy TV show; to me anyway, it seemed too defensive and mocking to be fun, and those Matrix-inspired fights got repetitive. This one looks like that one, but its precedent is Loony Tunes. All pretense is erased, female empowerment themes get taken for granted, and it has so little exposition to bog it down, I'm not sure the screenwriters - all three of them - can spell "exposition."

This is not a movie.

It's a pinball machine.

Not since the heady days of Cannonball Run has there been a big studio release so guilelessly, intentionally plastic. The difference is those movies were barely awake and these are made by careerists who have fun spinning lazy into gold. Sitting through the blinding, bludgeoning, ricocheting, unabashedly entertaining jiggle and giggle that is Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle - from director McG, who brought you the original, and also videos from Spacehog, Sublime, Sugar Ray, and Smashmouth, and who is currently negotiating with his mom to sign the permission slip so he can adapt the Hot Wheels toy line into a feature for Columbia - my thoughts turned to high school biology class, and not for the obvious inquiry into Angel biology. I remembered something about a creature called the sea squirt.

As a larva, the adolescent sea squirt wanders the ocean, swimming through flotsam and jetsam, looking for a shell or hunk of coral to call home. When it finds its final resting place, where it can relax and live out the rest of its days, it forgoes use of its own brain.

And eats it.

Much the way, I guess, audiences are encouraged to do when they step into Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. Surprisingly, as ludicrous and artificial and often badly made as it is - the special effects, for one, are crummy - the taste isn't so bad. I watched it with a smile.

It's hard to hate a movie that has Diaz enter in pigtails and a mini-skirt made of fur, clutching a Frommer's Mongolia and a Swedish accent. She climbs atop a mechanical yak and rides in slow motion while "Funky Cold Medina" plays on the jukebox and sherpas root her on and Liu rescues a federal marshal and he warns her not to take on Mongolians:

There must be 50 men, he says. "I know," she says, thrilled. "Hardly seems fair."

It doesn't. There's so much going on at such a hectic, bam-bam-bam pace that it leaves you buzzing and feeling empty inside, but anxious for more empty, sensory thrills, to get home and re-create the sensation - turn on the TV, VCR, DVD, dish washer, vacuum, blender, toaster, and stand at the front door and ring the door bell repeatedly for no reason, slip Foreigner into the stereo and play air drums with your index fingers to "Jukebox Hero."

There's an end-of-the-world party sense, as if there will never be another sequel and let's get it all in now. My notebook reads like this: chess scene, rodeo, Bob Hope, Bruce Willis, Luke Wilson, beaver costume, Matt LeBlanc, car wash, Olsen twins, Blues Brothers, David Bowie, Judas Priest, the J. Geils Band, Bernie Mac as Bosley, John Cleese, Rebel Without a Cause, CSI, Eve, the kid from Holes, Cape Fear, Crispin Glover, surf boards, Bob Dylan, and Yahtzee. When Diaz dances to an MC Hammer video, the movie just turns itself over completely to pop, and the crisp image of the movie screen becomes the lines of resolution from a TV cathode tube.

When people drip with contempt for the guilty pleasure of summer movies, when they complain about the vapidity of American movies these days, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle is the kind of movie they're talking about. If the first one was Diaz's, thanks largely to booty shaking in Spider-Man briefs, the sequel is a showcase for Demi and the benefits of eating right, avoiding carbohydrates, swearing by Pilates, dating young, and divorcing Bruce Willis. It's a coming-back party.

She plays an astrophysicist who invented motocross then turned her back on the Order of the Jiggle. She is a dark Angel in a black bikini and the body of a 35-year-old. She slinks around in Victoria's Secret and a mink and says she wants to play God, although the plot only has something to do with an encryption key to the FBI's witness protection list. It's a supporting role but Moore is filmed in long, loving close-ups as if she were Ingrid Bergman.

McG cuts to faces a lot, and he should. His cast is all sun and chemistry and charisma - especially Lucy Liu this time - and he's developed the smart habit for ignoring logic and just letting us bask. I hate letting this thing off the hook entirely - McG has also developed an unwarranted sense of superiority to his material - but it absolutely nails that summertime feeling of turning on the radio and hearing an old song you love that's not very good but sounds good right now, if only for 10 seconds, then you can change the channel.

That's Charlie's Angel: Full Throttle in a nutshell. It has its cheese and eats it too.

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