Lara Croft: Tomb Raider Review
by Jerry Saravia (faust668 AT aol DOT com)January 25th, 2002
LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER (2001)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
January 25th, 2001
RATING: One star and a half
People go to the movies to escape reality, not confront it. I have no problem spending two hours in front of a movie and being merely entertained, and then forget it about the next day. They are called popcorn movies, forged since the advent of "Star Wars" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark" 20 years ago. But "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" is one hour and a half of such tired nonsensical gibberish that you will definitely forget about it the next day.
I know this movie is based on a popular video game. I know Angelina Jolie (one of the most charismatic actresses in cinema now) plays Lara Croft as bewitchingly as she is allowed to play her. I also know the plot, dealing with a hidden clock that has an eyepiece that can be used at the precise moment of planetary alignment to unlock secrets of the universe or something to that effect, is meant to be a device, a MacGuffin, for the action sequences. Whoops! What did I just say? Yes, folks, you do recall what the MacGuffin is, don't you? It is a term derived from Alfred Hitchcock's suspense ouevre referring to the object that the characters are looking for that the audience could care less about. The audience is really just interested in the relationships between the characters. But "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" uses the MacGuffin as a showcase for showing Jolie shooting her way out of crumbling temples with two .45 pistols, all at the expense of character development. There is a villain for Lara to match wits with
and a former boyfriend who becomes a traitor but they are just window dressing for the action on display.
This movie is a big-screen commercial for a video game, nothing more. The characters are thin, the plotting more than just merely confounding, the action is slipshod complete with milisecond cuts and glaring techno pop music reminding us to be excited and so on. Locations change randomly with abrupt transitions. One minute Jolie is showering, the next she is shooting some stone monkeys and all with a delicate British accent. She winks, smiles, flaunts her breasts even in an icy tundra and that is it. The fact that she is an archaeology professor is a moot point (one line of dialogue makes a reference to her profession and even then it seems unbelievable). Usually this is the kind of movie one makes before winning an Oscar, not after it.
The summer of 2001 will go down in history as the worst summer for movies ever, and "Tomb Raider" will be further proof of it. Basing a movie on a video game is not a terrible idea - it's just that one has to separate the game from the movie. Here, they are one and the same.
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