Everyone sing along with me now: Hooray For Hollywood!
Angelina Jolie plays Lara Croft, a rich British woman with big breasts
who also just happens to go hunting around in temples and caves all over the
world in search of treasures and archeological antiquities. The quest for
this film is some triangle that will allow the bearer of the piece to travel
back and forth in time. Lara wants to use it to visit her father, Lord
Croft (Jon Voight), who mysteriously departed this world in 1985.
Of course,
there is a nemesis to deal with and he comes in the form of Manfred Powell
(Iain Glen), who looks more like a European hairdresser than he does an
archeologist (and it is the latter of these that we are meant to believe he is).
He's working for some organization called Illuminati, who
of course want this mysterious piece for their own devious use.
The device only works during some sort of galactic lining up of the planets,
so the ticking clock theory is in effect for the story.
I would really love to meet the people who keep giving director Simon
West steady work. He edits his scenes even more than Michael Bay does and he shoots his action scenes so close up that it is
almost impossible to make out what is going on. There is plenty of action to
be had, but what's the point of it if the audience can't see it?
As far as the cast goes, it's simple: no characters to work with equals no
performances to speak of. The one-liners that are given to Jolie, Noah
Taylor as Lara's sidekick Bryce and Chris Barrie as her butler are horrendous.
Jolie herself looks the part, but she shows less life as Lara Croft than
her videogame doppelganger does.
Jon Voight has only a few scenes, and
I am sure he is thanking God right now for that lack of screen time.
Ordinarily, when a film is as badly executed as this, you can usually say that the visual
effects at least are really cool. Not here. For a one hundred million dollar
film, the budgets look like they cost about $3.00 (they must have spent the
rest of the money on Jolie's padded bras).
There will be people, namely those who
fantasize about the videogame Lara Croft - she's only zeroes and ones. She's
NOT REAL! - that will defend the film saying, "What did you expect? The film
is based on a videogame! You don't know how to have fun!" To them, I say
this: Get a life. Put down your joystick, walk outside your parents' house
and instead of walking to your local brainwashing plant (multiplex), go out
and meet a real human being that may interest you.
Get to know them and
discover a world beyond videogames and movies based upon them.
Then, if you still want to see a great action adventure film or two after
experiencing the outside world, watch The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and
Raiders Of The Lost Ark and forget that Tomb Raider ever existed.
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