Lara Croft: Tomb Raider

Late on a Saturday night. I was just looking for some mindless entertainment…and boy did I find it. I don’t know if this flick was meant to be in 3D, but Angelina Jolie’s character certainly was: 3D x 2, to be precise. Lara’s enhanced physique is so prevalent throughout the show that it is almost like a running—and occasionally bouncing and bobbing—joke, which is ironic since one of the key missing elements of this movie is actual humor, as in humor that is a) intentional and b) something you would actually laugh at. Further conceptual follies are found in the story’s half-assed attempts at being vaguely scientific, via some humbug about a planetary alignment, not to mention various other plot missteps. Even the raw action sequences come across as bland and not particularly inventive (a real black mark considering this film was made contemporaneously with the Matrix trilogy). If I had to point to some good aspects of this work, I suppose I could say that Jolie’s performance is decent, and she gets acceptable support from a pre-Bond Daniel Craig, plus the story does provide a bare minimum of entertainment despite its many flaws. Still, you can’t be too generous towards a dunce work like this one. Instead of pulling things out of a tomb, a better idea would probably be to bury this flick in one, and leave it there for a bad long time.