Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/Tomb Raider

Movie Guru Rating:
Bad Karma (2 out of 5)

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Not even those can save Tomb Raider

by Zak Weisfeld

I have a confession to make. I'm a bad movie reviewer, or at least a naughty one. This week I could have reviewed a well regarded French thriller, a high-brow Western remake of the Mayor of Casterbridge, or an award-winning film that dramatizes the struggle of Latino custodial workers in Los Angeles to organize a union. But it's summer. It's 85 degrees and sunny. So instead, late on Saturday night, I find myself slouching into a stadium theater seat with a bag of popcorn the size of a scuba tank and waiting for the opening explosions of Tomb Raider. I don't have to wait long.

If there's one thing you can count on in Tomb Raider, it's the explosions. There are more of them than there are completed sentences and they are regular enough to set your watch by. Between the larger booms, Tomb Raider is punctuated with enough bangs, pops, wooshes and squeals to keep your attention focused on the screen even when your brain has settled in an alpha wave pattern of the kind that indicates profoundly deep sleep or irreversible coma. A pattern that is occasionally jarred, but never quite ruptured, by Angelina Jolie's preternatural bosom. And maybe that's the point.

Because Tomb Raider certainly isn't about anything else. Oh, there's a plot, of sorts. Angelina Jolie's Lara Croft is the Tomb Raider—a post-post-modern Indiana Jones. The planets are whirling into some kind of 5,000 year alignment and there's a shadowy group, called the Illuminati, trying to join two halves of a mystical triangle that will give them unimaginable power. Like most of these shadowy, global conspiracies bent on world domination, this one is run by a very well-dressed and genteel group who look as if they already run the world, which only serves to beg the question. But regardless, they want to run it more, and so, using a mystical clock/key discovered by Lara Croft's mysteriously deceased father, they set out to find the two pieces, etc. Did I mention the explosions?

After several minutes of triangles, long-lost fathers, planetary alignments and dozens of explosions, it quickly becomes clear that Tomb Raider doesn't really have a plot, per se. To even think about a movie like Tomb Raider in terms like story or plot is like discussing Andy Warhol in terms of brushwork. Tomb Raider couldn't care less about plot. At times it seems like the movie is an experiment in negative plot, in the space around the plot. It's an exercise, not in how to tell a story with pictures, but how to keep an audience in their seats solely through the juxtaposition of breasts and explosions.

Or it may just be that Tomb Raider, which began as a PC video game, is trying to maintain the purity of its post-plot origins. The movie's producers realized the all the clutter of plot and character would only impede the audience's sensation of playing a video game with incredibly high resolution—a video game where you could really make out the soft contours of Lara's lips as they curled into a smirk that says, quite clearly, "I don't give a shit about any of you." Slowing the visceral impact of Angelina Jolie with a bunch of old fashioned character/story mumbo jumbo would not only seem dated, but would alienate the majority of Tomb Raider's audience.

What these people failed to realize is that the armrests of the theater seats, while equipped with mammoth cupholders, are still lacking joysticks. And that makes all the difference in the world. Without them, my relationship with Lara Croft has gone from one of possessor (in the voodoo sense, not the slavery sense—though some of that, too) to that of stalker. In going from game to screen Lara has turned her players into her audience. It's a lateral move, at best. And it's not one that makes Tomb Raider much of a pleasure to watch.

Angelina Jolie does succeed in a few disparate moments to infuse Tomb Raider with some of her feral energy. Her Lara Croft gives good smirk. But the moments never last and are quickly beaten into submission by some clunky set-piece action sequence, which is perhaps Tomb Raider's greatest fault. With b-team director Simon West at the helm (the maestro behind ConAir), even Tomb Raider's action scenes feel sluggish and disjointed. Which is especially ironic considering that every day millions of gamers are directing Lara Croft through similar scenes with much more grace and passion than the lackluster West.

No matter how you slice it, Tomb Raider is a failure. Instead of the visceral engagement of a video game, or the emotional engagement of a movie, Tomb Raider left me with nothing but a ringing head—and an Angelina Jolie shaped hole in my heart.