Review of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) by Ahmad J — 07 Mar 2014

Schlocky, much like the majority of Simon West's career. Based on the popular video game series, this is about Lara Croft (Angelina Jolie), traveling to all corners of the world to get ancient powerful artifacts before villains do, but then teaming up with them with them to get them faster.

.. I don't know. Do you know what a MacGuffin is? That's what this movie is all about. The whole movie, everybody's trying to get these magical triangle pieces, without giving much of any explanation on what they are, or why they are so important, only letting on that they are a hot commodity.

It's pretty fascinating to see what a mess the story is; there isn't really anything about this that fits together or makes much sense about anything. It's not like this video game series has this rich history that needs to be slavishly followed; they could have taken a number of liberties, and as long as it starred a woman with twin handguns, fans would have been satisfied.

But no, they just clearly didn't care at any point, as evident by this ludicrous and nonsensical script; when people think about bad video game movies, this is also known as Exhibit A. Even all of the action is clumsily executed and shot too closely to be fully appreciated.

Much of the CGI has not aged well, and there are a few sequences featured here that look like they are straight out of a 90's music video. The thing that I totally forgot about Tomb Raider is that this features Daniel Craig, five years before he got cast as James Bond.

It's... interesting to see him do his Indy impression, and in a sense, that really is what this movie is: a very poor man's Indiana Jones.