Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: Blu-ray disc DVD Review

(Originally published June 15, 2001)

Last fall, when Paramount Pictures began touting the new Simon West movie, “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” an action-adventure film based on the hugely popular video game series, there was no question that its controversial star, Angelina Jolie, was perfect for the role. Both women are talented, beautiful, gross exaggerations.

In the video games, everything about Lara Croft is bigger than life--the foes she fights, the stunts she performs, the guns she wields, the venues she visits and especially her breasts, which are so wildly out of proportion to the rest of her body, they were instrumental in making Lara Croft the world’s first cyber pinup girl.

Jolie, the Academy Award-winning actress whose marriage to Billy Bob Thornton has given new meaning to the word “spectacle,” is an exaggeration of a different sort. Whether she’s accused of breaking up relationships, admitting in the current issue of Rolling Stone that she’d like to drink her husband’s blood before biting holes in his body and then devouring him, or busy denying an incestuous relationship with her brother, nothing about her seems real.

With her angular features, large eyes and impossibly full lips, she doesn’t even look real--although she does look a lot like the cartoonish Lara Croft, which brings us back to “Tomb Raider’s” one true stroke of genius: its casting.

Too bad the rest of the film is such an uninspired wreck. In spite of Jolie giving her all as Croft--the actress has a terrific sense of irony and does most of her own stuntwork, which is impressive considering the complexity of the stunts--the soulless mess of a script consistently lets her down, as does Simon West’s hackneyed direction.

In its most streamlined form, the complex plot whips around Lara, a super-rich, post-feminist English babe who, as a child, tossed aside her teacups and silver spoons for a life of globe-trotting adventure. Think of her as a female Indiana Jones, but with a body that could blow holes through James Bond’s icy veneer.

Using her extravagant mansion as a training ground, Lara eventually comes in contact with a group of men, archly called the Illuminati, who want ownership of a time-travel device that only works when the planets align every 5,000 years. For Lara, having the power is clear--she’ll be able to bring back her dead father (John Voight, Jolie’s real father) and finally have a life with him.

For the men working against her, well, as is so often the case in these sorts of movies, somebody will become God and control the world after making a connection, this time with something called the Triangle of Light.

Sound fun? It isn’t. The problem with “Tomb Raider” isn’t just its cut-and-paste cliches, its plodding story or its badly conceived action sequences, but that Lara Croft is too invincible for her own good. Since she’s never given a vulnerable moment, it’s difficult to believe she’s ever really in peril. Indeed, all the world can blow up around Lara Croft--and it does here--but who cares when there’s no reason to fear for her life?

Grade: D+

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