DIRECTOR
Simon
West
SCREENWRITERS
Patrick
Massett
John Zinman
STORY
BY
Sara
B. Cooper
Mike Werb
Michael Colleary
Simon West
PRODUCERS
Lawrence Gordon
Lloyd Levin
Colin Wilson
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Peter Menzies Jr.
MUSIC
Graeme Revell
EDITORS
Stuart Baird
Dallas S. Puett
Glen Scantlebury
CAST
Angelina Jolie (Lara Croft)
Jon Voight (Lord Croft)
Iain Glen (Manfred Powell)
Noah Taylor (Bryce)
Daniel Craig (Alex West)
Christopher Barrie (Hillary)
Julian Rhind-Tutt (Mr. Pimms)
Leslie Phillips (Wilson)
MPAA rating: PG-13
Running
time: 100m
U.S. release: June 15, 2001
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official website
Other Simon
West garbage
reviewed on this website:
- Con
Air
- The
General's Daughter
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The video-game movie adaptation
is a peculiarly degraded subgenre -- there's another one, Final
Fantasy, on the way this summer -- with a pedigree that includes
Double Dragon, Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter,
and two Mortal Kombat films. I haven't seen any of the
earlier ones, but it's hard to believe they could've been worse
than Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Even by video-game-movie
standards, this is an arrogantly, almost smugly empty
and incoherent mess. Couldn't this have been a surprise?
Couldn't it have been smarter and more fun than we expected?
Is this really what Hollywood thinks we want, or is it what they
want us to want?
Angelina Jolie swings into
action, both guns blazing, her prosthetic breasts refusing to
budge (in some scenes they appear to be lopsided). She doesn't
make the mistake of taking Lara Croft seriously, but she doesn't
commit herself either -- at times she comes perilously close
to Uma Thurman's arch, I'm-too-smart-for-this-shit performance
in The
Avengers. Jolie is too smart for it, and though
physically she's a good match for Lara, she just doesn't have
pulp heroism in her soul. The way she delivers some of her lines,
if you didn't know she was the hero, you might think Jolie was
playing a femme fatale who's about to pull a double-cross.
Can I, without sounding stupid,
point out that the plot makes no sense? (Of course it
makes no sense, comes the answer; that's the point.) It
has something to do with the Illuminati (I think I heard this
pronounced two different ways in the film), who seek to control
time itself by joining two pieces of a sacred triangle during
the alignment of the planets. It's up to Lara, with the posthumous
help of her father (Jon Voight), to stop the Illuminati and --
I just noticed my toe is itching. Sorry. You see how easily I
can be distracted from the "story." It was worse during
the movie.
The director here is one Simon
West. Lara's training robot, programmed to attack Lara and keep
her in fighting trim, is also named Simon; both Simons run roughshod
over this movie, hardwired for destruction. West has previously
given us Con
Air, which treated the audience like idiots, and The
General's Daughter, which treated the audience like complete
idiots. West has advanced even more -- Tomb Raider treats
the audience like complete and utter idiots. When a character
says "Tempus fugit," there's a cut to Lara, who helpfully
says "Time flies." I love that. What if Simon
West had directed Silence
of the Lambs? When Lecter says "Quid pro quo,"
would West have had Clarice say "Something for something"?
Rather heartwarmingly, West
continues to prove that a director with no talent for action
whatsoever can get work as an action-movie director. The many
shootouts spit at us in split-second bites. A major sequence
features an attack by stone monkeys, who disintegrate obligingly
when shot or even nudged assertively. Watching Lara poof her
way through these non-terrifying creatures, I wondered why West
didn't go all the way and have the monkeys made out of wet Kleenex.
Really, if you were designing guardians for a tomb, wouldn't
you make them out of hardier stuff -- iron, enchanted spackle,
anything?
Objections to Tomb Raider
are perfectly beside the point because Tomb Raider is
perfectly beside the point. Even when Lara is reunited with her
long-lost father briefly near the end, and even though we are
watching a real-life father-daughter acting duo here, there's
no spark whatsoever. Jon Voight, once capable of Midnight
Cowboy and Coming Home, is stuck in this summer crap
with his daughter; he has to stand there and trade lines with
her, avoiding the sight of her fake boobs. The movie, if nothing
else, made me respect Jon Voight as a father. He must really
love Angelina to agree to jump into this pool of stupidity with
her, so that maybe she wouldn't feel so alone among the stone
monkeys and shootouts. Watching the scene between them, I didn't
hear what was actually said; what I heard was "Dad, did
I sign up for a turkey here?" "Yes, honey, you did,
but I still love you."
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