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Review by Dustin Putman
1½ stars out of 4
It has been said that no motion picture based on a video game can be any
good, because to watch a movie with live-action characters and surroundings
isn't even remotely the same, or as satisfying, as directly interacting with
their digital counterparts. With 1995's "Mortal Kombat" being the only
feature film I can think of to break the video-game-to-movie curse, "Lara
Croft: Tomb Raider," drearily directed by Simon West (1997's "Con Air"), has
no such luck.
This latest potential summer blockbuster has a lot riding on it; not only
could the movie catapult Academy Award Winner Angelina Jolie (1999's "Girl,
Interrupted") to superstar status, but it could be the first in a potential
big-screen series. Never having played the video game, but with a brother who
is a fan, he couldn't have summed it up better as we left the theater: "Aside
from a few of the action scenes, the rest of the movie is sleep-inducing."
Rarely has such a big-budget action movie been as utterly boring as "Tomb
Raider" is.
Lara Croft (Angelina Jolie) is a tomb raider (whatever that is) who lives in
an 85-bedroom mansion, complete with a servant, an assistant (Noah Taylor),
and a pet robot, passed down to her from her deceased father, Lord Croft
(Jolie's real-life dad Jon Voight). Just as all nine planets are about to
align (an occurrence, we learn, that only happens every 5,000 years), Lara
stumbles upon a clock her beloved father hid in the house that holds half of
the key to taking control of time. The other part--a Triangle of Light broken
into two pieces--has been hidden on opposite sides of the earth, something
that the evil Manfred Powell (Iain Glen) has set out to locate in time for
the eclipse. With not much time remaining, Lara ventures off after Powell and
his henchmen, determined to do her dear dad proud.
The convoluted plotting of "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" doesn't make a whole lot
of sense, but that wouldn't matter if the movie was at least absorbing and
exciting. It isn't, however, so what we get is a slow-moving snoozer that
features so much dull exposition it hardly has time for what the viewer has
come for--action. At 98 minutes, the film feels as if it is well over two
hours, with little of interest occurring at any point. In their attempt to
explain who Lara Croft is for the uninitiated, screenwriters Patrick Massett
and John Zinman spend far too much time setting things up, and even then, we
still don't get a true idea of what makes Lara tick.
Angelina Jolie is physically perfect for the coveted role of Lara Croft, but
as a person, she is nothing more than a blank slate. Jolie has been a
terrific actress in the past, and even has an Oscar to prove it, but she
isn't able to give us an idea of who her character is, or why we should even
like or care about her. Aside from the fact that her father died and she is
crafty with weapons and fighting, Lara is an uninteresting, underdeveloped
presence, and the part gets no help from Jolie. Though no fault of the
actress, one other problem with Lara is, funnily enough, her breasts. At
almost no point throughout do they ever look remotely real, and for Jolie's
body frame, they are humorously too large and stand directly out, rather than
naturally slope downward. I mention this minor criticism because Jolie's fake
breasts serve no purpose for either her character or the movie; they're
merely exploitive.
"Tomb Raider" has two good scenes amidst the creative dead zone that
surrounds them. One involves stone statues coming to life in a tomb, which
Lara has to fight off, and the other is the climactic action sequence set in
a snowy cave, which is appropriately taut and well-shot. They not only hint
at the thrilling movie this could have been, but expose the other lifeless 75
minutes for what they truly are: a waste of time.
Copyright © 2001 Dustin Putman
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out of 4
