I bet they thought "Her chest is big enough to carry the movie!"
OK, granted, the Laura Croft of the popular game series the movie takes its name from is indeed very buxom--so the film makers can only be blamed for being true to the source by accentuating Angelina Jolie's own endowments. But this movie was about as 3-dimensional as the original video game. The story was, well, pretty non-existent. Your basic must-find-cool-and-powerful-item-before-the-other-guy. Yeah, that about covers it. I DID like the inclusion of the legendary Illuminati fnord as the secret shadow organization which is the "other guy." But I was embarrassed by the lack of depth that was given also. The Illuminati has a vast and complex history (even if fictional)...(or IS it?) that was barely glanced upon here. Anyone unfamiliar with the Illuminati mythos certainly won't miss what they don't know they're missing, and may be satisfied with simply accepting the existence of this mysterious society/organization/cult/government/whatever-the-movie-is-trying-for as a generic adversary. But I, and I think anyone who has ever heard of Steve Jackson, Discordia, Robert Anton Wilson, will be very disappointed. But I'm on a tangent here.
There's very little dialogue in this movie with what little there is being one-liners and a couple pretty banal conversations. It felt like the scriptwriter was probably given a storyboard of all the action and told to stick some words in between a few panels. And having had something better to do asked his 14 year old son to come up with something and then threw it in. I feel sorry for Ian Glen, who played Powell, the Illuminati's agent with his own ideas in search of the time-stopping artifact. He seems like he could be a good, smarmy villain worthy of a classic Bond film if only given a chance with a good script. In one scene in which he's trying to be a not-bad-guy in order to get information from Laura before she finds out what kind of guy he really is, his dialogue consists of such brief superficial statements of obvious insincerity not only is Laura able to tell from their short meeting he's a "bad guy" but so could a Muppet. Without a hand.
The action, well, I have to give some credit. Not bad. It's filled with your basic John Woo wannabe action cum Matrix that's mildly entertaining. But it's not inspired. We've been treated to such artistic or stunning sequences as seen in "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" and "The Matrix" so I realize that the bar may have been raised a bit high and failure to live up to that standard implies bad action. I realize not every popcorn-movie flick can be as awesome (I mean that word in its true context, not the 1980's version) as the best examples in the field so I'm going to cut it some slack. If compared to say the recent "Dungeons & Dragons" movie, "Tomb Raider" is a specimen of action mastery!
The ending of the movie is very abrupt and felt oddly edited. Like large pieces were missing. To the point that it rode the line of anti-climactic. (If the movie did a better job rising TO a climax, then the ending would have definitely been "anti-".) The crux of the ending involves a reasonably touching scene between Laura and her dad (played by Angelina's real dad Jon Voit,) with a fight sequence kinda tossed in there at the end because the hand-book on making action flicks says there has to be a hand-to-hand at the end of every movie. And I had many questions while the credits rolled. Why did that happen, what justified this happening, I don't get what the purpose of that was, and the like. But I realize that all these lingering questions can be easily dismissed with "do I really care if there's an answer?" I shrug and instead pull out my old Playstation copy of "Tomb Raider" and have more fun than I did at the movie.
Category: Movie
Genre: Action
Date Reviewed: 2001-01-01
Pros:
Cons:
Rating: 5