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"Lara Croft: Tomb Raider"
(Reviewed June 2, 2001)
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Boring beyond belief. That's right, folks: The most anticipated action-movie extravaganza of 2001 turns out to be five percent Stuff Blowing Up and 95 percent Audience Falling Asleep.
I've never played the "Tomb Raider" video game, but I assume it involves a lot of non-stop run-and-gun activity. What I assume it does not include are interminable sections of somnabulent people standing around expressionless in meeting rooms and mansions, boring each other to death with dialog about missing artifacts and Lara's presumed-dead dad.
The direction is terrible throughout, especially in the (few and far between) action segments. You sit there knowing at times that a lot of stuff is going on, and yet you wonder why none of it manages to be exciting or even interesting. Maybe it's because Angelina Jolie plays Lara as if she actually is a two-dimensional computer-screen character. (Well, except for those bowling balls she carries around in her tight T-shirts, that is.) Her face rarely changes from a single "serious ass-kicker, no-nonsense, sexy-sourpuss" expression. There's just no *fun* in this flick, folks.
The movie kicks off with Lara battling a big robot, but the scene is cut together so badly it is hard to get a good, long look at the thing or what is going on most of the time. We then are introduced to that most tiresome of movie cliches, the nerdy computer assistant. Ho. Hum. Oh, and Lara also has her own "Alfred"-equivalent butler. That's appropriate, because the most deadly dull portions of this movie will remind you of all the things you didn't like about the first "Batman." (Remember how all of the Wayne Manor and Keaton-as-Bruce-Wayne stuff bored your ass off, and how you kept waiting and praying for Nicholson to get back in the picture? There ya go--except this time there's no Joker coming along to relieve the tedium.)
Later, gunmen shooting up Lara's mansion get off about a million and a half rounds of ammo without managing to nick Our Heroine. (This kind of thing always bugs me, although I really should be used to it by now.) Apparently, we are supposed to believe that Lady Croft--who must be worth at least a few million pounds, and who knows that she possesses something extremely valuable to unsavory characters--wouldn't bother with putting in a security system that was any damned good. If this movie were played completely for laughs, that kind of casual disregard for her property might make sense. But the production is so ponderously earnest in the non-action scenes that it plays like an elegant Ivory-Merchant film, except without that wacky Henry Jamesian "zip."
When Lara finally...FINALLY...makes it to an actual tomb, there is some okay animation of brought-to-life figures--but the "money shot" is a complete disaster, ruined by a "slow-motion" bit that looks unbelievably lousy for a movie with this kind of budget.
Things wrap up in an ice cave with a big contraption that does its thing, and it's all very silly, especially the would-be emotional climax, which falls completely flat. The most amazing thing about this movie is that it's only about an hour and a half long. You will swear it was at least twice that length by the time you stumble zombie-like from the multiplex.
In fact, the most appropriate line in the entire movie comes when a character announces that one of his butt-cheeks has fallen asleep.
I know the feeling, pal. Times two.
Back Row Grade: F
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