Tomb Raider (2001)
Simon West
USA
103 mins, color, English
Pathetic. Here's a film that should have stayed as the stupid video game that it was. Maybe a big-breasted chick is enough to get nerdy losers glued to their screen for days, but it certainly is not enough to hold my attention for more than 10 minutes, and it does not matter how much phony British accent she tries to imitate. TOMB RAIDER is the proof that you can steal fresh ideas from just about every adventure film out there and still end up with a product as dead as a skunk splattered all over the interstate. And just as stinky.
It took three guys to write the script for this thing and I don't know what they spent their time on, but it certainly was not dialogue. It certainly wasn't the story. It most certainly wasn't the costumes. Whatever it was that they did, I hope they got paid well because they'll need all the money for the copyright infringement suits that should fall on their case as my Mom after me getting bad grades.
Surprisingly, Lara Croft (Angelina Jolie) stunk up the place the worst. Ok, OK, second worst; the first HAS to be that sniveling computer dude, whose name I have mercifully forgotten already. (No self-respecting hacker, and I mean no one, will EVER hit his laptop when it does not work. It's either his fault, for which he should be ashamed, or an act of God, for which there's no remedy... yet.) Maybe there were some cool location shots, not many, but there were some. However, it is little consolation for sitting through an hour and a half of incredible ennui. My most heartfelt moment was during a lull in the action at the very end, where I heard someone in the audience loudly snoring. Judging by the laughter and applause, most people shared my feelings.
The story. Get this, Lara lives in some freaking enormous castle with no apparent source of income (oh, we do know she's a petty thief, but so are some of my friends and all they get are stinky trailers, if even that). Her daddy, the mercurial Lord Croft (Jon Voight) is dead, thanks goodness. She finds a clock, which turns out to be the glue to glue what no man has ever glued before; some 5,000 year old plate, which has the power to do kinky stuff with time. Yeah, no Caltech physics here. Naturally a bunch of evil secret (is that redundant?) dudes steal the dial because they naturally lust after world domination, although I fail to see how being able to go back in time would benefit them much. And we know they've got to fail because otherwise we would be seeing evil secret dudes popping up everywhere, messing with our time.
Anyway, Lara steals the first piece of the plate, then returns it, then they don't kill her (??? yeah, don't ask me, I don't know), then they take her with them (at which point THEY DESERVE to die for being so incredibly stupid), then she plays some tricks on them, some dude dies (at which point we learn Lara may have liked him), then she sees her father, who tells her not to do it again, then she kills a bad dude by throwing him off guard with some laughably amateurish moves, and then she pops up in white dress. For no good reason.
The credits roll at this point, but by that time I was already in the parking lot, trying to get a head start on the panicking crowd that was desperately shuffling out of the theater. It was THAT bad. I kid you not. Even the gawdawful stone warriors from THE MUMMY were so much cooler than the pathetic stone warriors in TOMB RAIDER: did these things just fall apart mostly by themselves? There was only one neat stunt in the entire film --- the bike scene where she rides on her front tire --- but that is not worth the price of admission. Avoid like BATTLEFIELD EARTH.
June 15, 2001. BLS