So I need a specific reason to re-post this DVD review of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, from 2001? What, like you have some objection to another picture of Angelina Jolie or something? Whatever…
Angelina Jolie), the film is a big hunk of depressingly dumb summer programming, and so
the main question one feels hanging over any viewing of the movie or
exploration of its more than three hours of painstakingly culled extras is: all
this, in service of what?
Well, a film franchise, one certainly presumes. But Lara
Croft: Tomb Raider is an inauspicious bow. This is not to suggest that Jolie,
who flings her body about with grace, precision and a persuasive air of
authority, is at all at fault. If some of the videogame’s more overt sexual
elements are understandably sacrificed at the Canonized Altar of PG-13, Jolie
still manages to convey a kick-ass sexual liberation merely with her leonine
gait and the sly, timely displacement of one of her increasingly famous
eyebrows (note to studios: investigate possibility of buddy cop flick with The
Rock).
There’s also a charismatic, guileful intelligence to match those
erotically hip-holstered hand cannons. If every other single character seems
flat and boring, thanks to Jolie we at least get a good sense of well-off
adventurer Lara Croft — of both her place within the film and why she’s such a
popular videogame character. The film’s putative plot revolves around a clock
and Lara retrieving two halves of a mysterious time travel device before the
sneeringly evil Manfred Powell (Iain Glenn) and his Illuminati, a group of
typically sinister-looking folks in typically sinister high-backed chairs, can
wreak world domination.
Yet on any level of sane judgment, the film fails. The
movie’s much-labored over script, on which six folks, including West himself,
share some form of credit, features dialogue so inescapably bland and
banal — actors sometimes just repeating other characters’ lines in the absence of
anything else to say — that entire exchanges can evaporate, like butter melting
between your ears, before you even know what the hell you’ve missed. Perhaps
most damning for an action movie, though, Tomb Raider just isn’t very exciting.
Apart from the frenetic opening sequence and an admittedly way-cool, bungee
cord-type shoot out in which Jolie is suspended on what for all intents and
purposes is a massive rubberband, Tomb Raider’s action is a dull pastiche of
loosely related jumps ’n’ stunts, the equivalent of preordained action dominoes falling
listlessly. We never for a moment feel peril — indeed, feel anything — and aside
from the gorgeous settings (the dense jungle of
the tundras and caves of
Tomb Raider offers nothing of quality for its charismatic lead to plunder or
rescue.
Still, for those inclined, the Tomb Raider DVD does offer a lot of nice
extras, including an audio commentary track by West, a look at Jolie’s intense training for
the role, a production featurette, four deleted scenes (including one that
sheds crucial light on Croft’s relationship with part-friend/part-nemesis Alex,
and two more which achieve the dubious distinction of having even worse
dialogue than the film), an alternate title sequence and the unedited version
of U2’s “Elevation” video. The most compelling extra, however, comes in the
form of a brief set interview with Jolie and her father Jon Voight. While this
may be a questionable choice for their first screen teaming, it’s heartening to
see the two reconciled and happy together… for the moment.