Separated at birth? Angelina Jolie (left) as Lara Croft and Lara Croft (right) as, well, Lara Croft. There's no denying that some people will enjoy the film adaptation of the video game Tomb Raider, which opened Friday and stars the smirky Angelina Jolie in the title role. Those people are adolescent boys who, when asked what they dig, will likely respond as astutely as the guy who recently shared his thoughts, and spelling skills, on Lara Croft: Tomb Raider on the Internet Movie Database:
There is nobody more perfect to play the role of Lara Croft as Angelina Jolie. She's got that something. The action is on the newest level and the acting is good could be better ( I meant Jon Voight ). I specialy liked the scenes where Lara was dressed in an ..... Ohh I am not going to destroy the suprise. This really is this sommers finnest.
To be sure, this guy makes a keen observation: Jolie, with perpetually arched eyebrows and a plasticky body that doesn't seem to feel any pain, is perfect as the game's Lara come to life, complete with her trademark lycra-and-leather get-up and a set of, um, weapons that'll have half the audience grinning for two hours.
Our IMDB guy is right, too, when he says that the acting here could be better. It could be a lot better. If we had high-school drama geeks playing most of the roles, it would be better.
But that isn't a surprise: Tomb Raider's poor acting is a product of its poor plot, which is due to the fact that the film is based on a video game -- and a film based on a video game is probably a fundamentally bad idea.
Good video games -- such as Tomb Raider -- offer up lavish, interactive worlds all their own, worlds that deliberately keep their jewels hidden from first glance. The desire to crack the mystery keeps you in the game, keeps you from sleep and family and friends, thumbs sore and eyes glazed, locked in a desperate hunt for some apparently eternal enigma.
Even action games, which to the uninitiated might seem like a mere mess of guts and gore, must be mastered; intricate rhythms of fingering, which are learned over time, are required to beat the bad guys.
Movies don't have the same luxury: they only have us for two hours, and they can't have us participate. (The best movies, of course, require our participation -- the best recent example of this is Chris Nolan's Memento.) In a movie, we are slaves to the director's vision, and if the director's vision is flawed, we're pretty much screwed.
That's what happens here. You can excuse the acting and the plot, because you don't go into Tomb Raider expecting Olivier in Hamlet; but what you want is at least some action sequences that approximate the fun of playing the game, the thrill of actually controlling characters on screen.
Though director Simon West fills Tomb Raider with many elaborate action sequences, he seems to have no capacity for creating a thrill.
When she fights, Croft leaps and lands like characters in The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but those moves do not, now, seem novel. Since she is ostensibly an archeologist, the film has been compared to the Indiana Jones pictures, but the comparison is insulting: those were smart films that had you white-knuckled in your seat.
Lara never gets in any messes like Indy did -- she's too tough, too snarky, and only a fool would take a swing at her. Many do, of course, but you know what happens to fools in action movies.
All of which make for a ho-hum experience. Not the sommers finnest.
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