Note: Here there be spoilers. Also, this entry has been reposted from my LiveJournal, with a few minor edits.
I went, with a few friends, to see Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life recently. I had been singing "The Circle of Life," from The Lion King, all day, so when the elephants showed up, I couldn't help but giggle. Unfortunately, that's just about as much fun as I had for the duration of the film, which was, as my mom would say, "just ok."
I didn't go in expecting much. Just some good action sequences in an enjoyable action movie, and Angelina Jolie looking, well, like Angelina Jolie, which is not a bad thing. (Especially for one of my friends--though she was hoping for a bit more nudity, she admitted.) There were action sequences, but they were strung together like beads on a string, with very little connecting them.
So maybe I was expecting a bit more than that, given that Jolie, in interviews, has touted this as a better movie than the first, and has claimed that they have finally "understood" Laura (I think that's the right word)--given her depth and character.
If they have, I didn't see it. The ultimate tests for Laura, coming at the conclusion, were telegraphed far to clearly for them to have much impact, and the character-building scenes--for any of the characters--were too few and far between. The romantic angle, though not identical to every other movie in the genre, was familiar enough not to be of much interest, and the gadgets wore thin, after so many James Bond movies. That, and the shark looked fake.
I think the opening sequence, with the underwater temple, was the best action sequence. It certainly wasn't the ending, which looked like it was being played on the set of Star Trek: The Original Series, and made me think of the ending of Labyrinth. It looked more fake than the shark, in other words.
Aside from the burning questions of how Laura could touch something that melted a gun five minutes before, and the ents-on-speed of the penultimate action sequence, there wasn't much to engage us. But my main complaint was that it simply wasn't fun enough. The villain--and Ciaran Hinds was the main reason I was there, after all--had far too few really good villainy moments, though his motive for doing something that could kill millions of innocent people was very amusing (it ran something like, "Haven't you ever looked around and thought that the world would be a better place without most of these people in it?"). The best moment of the film, for me--and I'm pleased to say Roger Ebert liked it to, though he likes the film, on the whole, much better than I do--was when the villain and two of his goons were heading up on an elevator and a mother and her child got on with them. The child promptly pushed every button, so that they would have to stop on every floor, and gave the villain a grin. The villain, in turn, gave him the most delicious look.
But sad to say, that really was my favorite moment in the movie. And the delay caused by the button-pushing didn't even have a pay-off, other than the look (which was, again, most delicious, but still). The movie on the whole just fell flat to me. Not fun enough, not thrilling or risky enough, and lacking in any real sense of character.
Though really, having started to play the video games at long last, the whole point of the thing is Lara Croft's breasts, and on that point, at least, the film succeeded.
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