LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER

reviewed by: ReelReviewz@aol.com

 

BIASES: mid 20s black male; frustrated screenwriter who favors action, comedy, and glossy, big budget movies over indie flicks, kiddie flicks, and weepy Merchant Ivory fare

LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER

MOVIE BIASES: Sexy visuals, sexy lead, but just what is this about? MAJOR PLAYERS: Angelina Jolie (Girl, Interrupted), Jon Voigt (Pearl Harbor), and director Simon West (The General's Daughter).

Converting the huge video game audience (such as myself) into a moviegoing audience has always been a slippery slope at best. Anyone remember the Super Mario Brothers movie? Double Dragon? Wing Commander? Good; neither do I. But in "Tomb Raider," the producers have actor, the game, and the budget to turn this video game into box office gold, not to mention a huge marketing campaign to boot. So why does this movie suck so bad? Because they forgot to give it heart.

Lara Croft (Jolie) is a young, bored, adventure-seeking heiress whose father had died years ago. When she's not off playing shoot-em-up games with her pet robot, she's trotting around the globe raiding tombs for artifacts. When some rare, interplanetary alignment occurs on the anniversary of her father's death, an antique clock starts ticking. That clock is actually one half of some relic that can control time. So, of course, bad guy Manfred Powell (Iain Glen) wants her half of it so he may take advantage of this once-in-a-five-thousand-year opportunity. Action ensues.

But very little else. They certainly got the right woman for the role. Taut, skinny, and Wonderbra-ed, Jolie has the look of the video game vixen, all the way down to the wispy bangs and hair extension ponytail braid. But in the producers' rush to instill grand set pieces, inventive fight sequences, and things that blow up, they forgot to give Lara Croft some CHARACTER. There's just simply nothing there. While Jolie's inescapable sexiness may maintain our interest through the shower scene in the movie's first ten minutes, that's about as long as we can stretch it. Okay, she's bored, she grimaces a lot, and she loves her dead daddy (Voigt), but there's nary an emotion amongst the three. It was as if they made the video game character come to life and are waiting on the audience to push her buttons. In a movie, it should be the other way around. On and off the page, Jolie does all that is asked of her, but that really only means acting as dressing for the next stunt or set piece.

And the set pieces aren't that bad. A mansion in London, mystical temples in Cambodia, icy plains in SiberiaŠIt still doesn't amount to a hill of beans if you're not invested in the characters (which you're not). Even the action sequences (which we've seen so many times in the massive marketing blitz, we could choreograph them ourselves) aren't enough to counter the considerable downtime in this movie, where the plot becomes increasingly dense (as in dumb) and convoluted. I was bored. We expect the script to be bad (as this one woefully is) and some of the jokes to fall flat (all of them do here), but don't be BORING. That's an unforgivable sin for a self-proclaimed summer action movie.

This is a media whore of a movie with product placement galore. It's not so much a movie as it is an assemblage of bad marketing. Could they be any more blatant with UPS, Range Rover, Pepsi, and Ericsson? For lack of a better term, this movie sucks. Really, it does. You can almost hear this giant, sucking sound IN the movie - your dying brain cells, the movie's (100 million dollar?) budget, peoples' careers going down the drain. And its heart. There's a hollow center where this movie's heart is supposed to be. And they're already talking about a SEQUEL? I don't wanna play anymore. Game over.

@ REEL (ONE REEL) If you can't sneak in, don't go in.

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