Hey folks, Harry here... This is our first review of TOMB RAIDER which was screened last night in Portland... Doofus is the first in with a full review, though another chap (who hated it) wrote me with a mini-review, but says he'll write up a long one tonight to detail what didn't work for him. Having never played TOMB RAIDER and having no real love for the idea of the film.... I've never been particularly enthused about seeing TOMB RAIDER. I want it to be good.... I'd love to see a kick-ass female action adventure film done straight... but nothing in any of the trailers got me excited for the film. Hopefully these early reviewers will be out of sync with the mainstream, but... well... we'll see. Here ya go...
Call me doofus.
First off, this appeared to be a completed print, the color matching wasn't complete, but all, or most, of the effects were done.
I had read Moriarty's brief glimpse at Tomb Raider before going to a screening for an unknown movie last night, so I did come somewhat prepared. I knew that there was some big robot thing, and I actually hadn't even made it down far enough to learn about the CGI work done on the stone monkeys. But, I had an idea of what to expect.
First, Angelina Jolie is perfect as Lara. She's got the accent down, she's got the look, and the moves as well. She could easily carry this franchise through a few more movies.
SPOILERS
I went in expecting to see cartoony kick-ass action. As my girlfriend said, "I just want to see girls kick ass. I don't care about anything else." Fair enough, me too.
The CG fly-through that Moriarty talks about is still there. The first encounter with Simon did, in fact, kick ass. There were four major action pieces in the movie, the encounter with Simon, the raid on Lara's house, the Thailand tomb raid (described by moriarty), and the finale. Unfortunatly, they started big, got bigger, became a bit silly, then became ridiculous. If you go to see it for those four action sequences, you should be just fine. You'll enjoy it. If you can ignore plot holes, and continuity errors, by all means, go. You'll have fun. It's loud, there's a good soundtrack, and Lara does, in fact, kick some ass.
But dear god...we have to sit through some boring-ass crap to get there. The leap of faith that Moriarty talks about regarding the clock...it's a big leap of faith. Lara wakes up to hear a modest desk clock ticking while hidden behind wooden panels under the stairs. I can't even hear my clock ticking when it's hanging on the wall down one flight of stairs.
She meets up with another male tomb raider, who evidently stole some artifact of hers earlier. She's pissed at him. She remains pissed at him through the entire movie. Then, at the end, she plays with the little time-triangle thing (don't ask) to save his life, going against her father's request. Why? Good question, ask the film makers.
In what is perhaps a nod towards the flares in the game, Lara and her cohorts carry around little orange fluorescent sticks, which are barely adequate to illumnate their faces. Thankfully, they carry them around in full-on lighted rooms, so they really don't need to illuminate anything at all.
The GOAL of this whole thing is to gain control of this triangle thing which was broken in two pieces after it was originally created 5000 years ago, when all the planets were in alignment. If you put it back together you either become god, or can affect time, or something. We don't really get a good idea of what the point of this whole quest is, but frankly, we're here to see Lara kick ass, so who really cares? Well, the ending is quite the mess, set in a huge james-bondian set which is a mock-up of the solar system, with the planets revolving around the sun, above a big tank of water. Why water? Dunno...'cause it's wet I guess. There are these little FX whorls going all over the room. A dog jumps through one, gets stripped to muscle, then bone, then comes out intact on the other side. Lara says, "wow, these are some kind of time disruption. Time is fractured here." Uh. you got that from the dog? Ok. Well, evidently these are anti-human time fractures, because while the dog goes through just fine, it eats up the bad guy at the end. huh.
That being said, the filmmakers have what could be a good franchise on their hands. They have a winning lead character, some interesting supporting characters, and a guaranteed audience. I just hope they do something better next time.
They have a hell of a time when Lara's mansion gets attacked. Lara's doing some aerobatics with bungee cords at the time, and uses that to full effect to smack down the baddies. That was, by far, my favorite action sequence.
Moriarty saw the first and third action sequences. If he could have seen the second as well, then he would have had a very good video game movie to see. As it is...well, it's not terrible, nor is it great.
Doofus out.
Hey folks, Harry here again... DLAK's review is EXTREMELY SPOILER HEAVY... I recommend if you want to see the film... not reading it. As literally he goes step by step through the movie as it currently is. He really makes the film sound like a stink bomb of epic levels... but I still hold on to Moriarty's like for the film as a good sign... However, my expectations will not be super high when I venture forth to see this one in a couple of weeks. Sigh...
I saw "Tomb Raider" last night at Lloyd Cinemas in Portland, OR. Summary: it suckked the big one.
SHORT REVIEW:
Terrible, even for summer blockbuster popcorn fare. While "The Mummy Returns" was mindless fun, "Tomb Raider" is simply mindless, and to be patronized by only the most die-hard of Lara Croft fans. The sets are beautifully done, as are the CGI and sound, but when you're down to reaching for the set direction for a compliment you know you're in bad shape.
The biggest problem is the writing -- at times I thought I was watching an Ed Wood flick. Stike that -- even Plan 9 had less predicible a plot and more interesting conversation, sentences constructed out of more than two-word pet phrases.
The acting was equally terrible, but again, they didn't have much to work with here. Jolie doesn't seem to act so much as simply "mug" for the camera, and her three basic moves as Lara are 1) dead fish "I'm a bad-ass" stare, 2) same w/cocky "I'm a bad-ass" left eyebrow raised, and the most emotionally moving 3) same w/cocky "I'm a bad-ass" grin.
I was actually pretty amazed at how far ahead I could call scenes, and how accurately. You too will give yourself an ego boost by staying a good 10-20 minutes ahead of the film. I suggest staying 2 hours ahead of the film and skipping it altogeather.
Leave more than just your expectations at the door -- leave your brain there as well. Whereas "Mummy" hits the floor but is still fun, this movie goes further and digs itself a hole -- dare I say a tomb.
SPOILER WALK-THROUGH:
The opening credits say it all -- this is a movie made "by the CGI, for the CGI".
We begin the film as a "fly through" of various hall-ways in what appears to be a pyramid, much in the vein of the opening "fly-through" for some of the video games when they patiently wait for you to press the start button.
At the end, it zooms out, and we see that the hallways and crevices are actually the three-dimensional "Z" coordinate of the "Tomb Raider" logo. The phrase "Tomb Raider", by the way, is used clumisly no less than half a dozen times throughout the movie by various characters -- typical movies refer to their titles no more than once, but then, typical movies aren't crass commercialism at its worst.
From there, we zoom out from an extreme close-up of Lara's eye, and the camera flips upside-down to reveal that she is in fact upside-down hanging on a rope in what appears to be a generic pyramid/tomb.
She does some flips, some jumps, we see a couple of crotch / leg / butt shots, and then out comes the robot extra from "Star Wars -- Episode 1".
She fires continously at the thing, running around, flipping, etc., eventually landing in a nice missionary position underneath it.
Somehow, as high-tech as this robot is, it seems to not have been equipped with a simple gun. How convenient.
Eventually she crushes the thing under a block, and we're all made to believe it's dead, but of course that's never how these formulaic things work and it comes back to life for a few more moments, just long enough for Jolie to reprise her "hacker" role and "hack" into the thing, turning it into a two-ton MP3 player with a laptop computer conveniently inside it's head. (I'm not making this up -- it really is this bad).
She then grabs the "treasure" and -- surprise -- the tomb is actually a "training room" inside her mansion, and the robot a sparring partner created by the token "eccentric".
The closest thing to nudity (and "wit") occurs next, as Lara takes a gratutitous shower scene, afterwards which we get a tasty peek of her left outside breast from the rear view (i.e. we don't get to see shit). The butler remarks that it's not very lady-like to step out of the shower naked in front of him, and she wittily replies, "Well, we shouldn't be un-ladylike, now should we?" All of the visual and sound cues are there that a witty remark was just made -- the only thing missing was actual wit.
Lara wakes up in the middle of the night to the sound of a clock ticking, and breaks into a room downstairs ("a hidden room! I never knew this room was here!") and breaks into a wooden box and removes an old clock. The next morning, she smashes it open with a hammer, only to reveal a mysterious round glowing "key" which is counting backwards.
Somewhere in there there's a flashback of a scene of her missing father and she visits his grave.
Her mother is dead too. Hmmm, kinda like "Batman" -- butler and all.
--- If you're planning on seeing the movie, stop here, all the above happened in the first 15
minutes or so, the rest is "real" spoilers ---
Somewhere in here there's a big meeting of about 100 people, all dark and quiet and ritual-like, in a mansion, with a man at a throne commanding that they need to find the two keys to unlock and find the two pieces of a golden triangle from an ancient civilization, and commands a character I will heretofore refer to as the token evil guy to go find it.
Lara takes the clock to an appraiser and en route runs into the token old flame character that stole an object from her in the past. They exchange supposed witty remarks and are off.
The appraiser -- an old man who knew Lara's father -- says he doesn't know what the clock/key thing is but reccomends she meet with a client of his.
Later, the old man meets with the token evil guy, and gives him all his notes on the clock. It turns out he knew exactly what the clock was but was part of the evil guy's cult to find the golden triangle, and he kneels down and gets his head chopped off by evil guy's sword. They bag his head, but like many loose ends in this movie, we never know what they do with it.
Cut to Lara at home, practicing acrobatics hanging from the ceiling. It's raining, it's night, and a troop of a dozen guys in black with night vision and laser scopes surround her house. They all crash through the windows, and there's a big fight scene whereby these expert marksmen fail to hit Lara even once while they get pummeled by rubber bullets from her and get thrown or cut down from their hanging ropes and fall a few stories to the ground. Note: Lara does not kill (or if any of their falls was deadly, the movie gives no indication of their fatality -- and like videogames, their bodies disappear the next morning, no ambulence, no police).
The butler comes out at the last minute, fires a few rounds, runs out of ammo, and the token black character (one of the token evil guy's henchmen) spares his life.
Lara's key is, of course, stolen.
-- The remainder of this review is summarized --
Lara gets a package from a friendly product-placement-UPS delivery man (where again more "wit" is used, as the driver looks around and sees the mess from all the broken windows and bullet holes and asks what happened, and Lara replies "I just woke up this morning and decided that everything had to go."), which turns out to be from her father, which is a poem, which leads her to a book in the library, which leads her to a hidden part of the book she cuts open, which turns out to hold a letter from her father, which tells her where to find the 2nd key, which leads her to Asia (Singapore, I believe, don't recall), where token evil guy already is with a troop of Asians trying to tear down a Buddha image, which then gets torn down to the sound of their cheering (this would NEVER NEVER happen -- even crumpling up a napkin with a Buddha image on it is against the law and sacred), Lara finds the back entrance, a ghost girl spirit leads her to the room with the key, evil guy and hench men (along with her ex-flame from earlier scene) make their way to there, evil guy finds place to put the key, Lara finds the REAL place to put the key, Lara shouts to them and they don't kill her and instead toss her the key, she puts it in, jumps on and "rides" a giant swinging phallic symbol which busts open a globe of goo, she grabs the first triangle piece, rock/cement stone monkeys come to life, guns are fired, a giant six-armed statue comes to life, Lara crushes it, then she flies away on the claws of a rock gargoyle (!?!?) where it mysteriously explodes ouside, dropping her, and she runs off into the jungle, where she then meets a Buddhist in town who helps her place a call (again, this would NEVER happen -- women are not allowed contact with Buddhists), where she then meets another Buddhist in a temple, who gives her tea which removes her gunshot wounds instantly and he talks like Yoda, Lara eventually meets with evil guy in the throne room, then meets him a SECOND time and gives him the triangle piece and agrees to cooperate because if the triange can become whole then she can bring her dead father back to life, there's a LOOOOOOOONG scene (almost as long as this review!) of them travelling to the artic, and traveling, and traveling some more ("What is this, 'Planes Trains and Automobiles'?!"), finally reaching an ICE temple (very creative, nothing at ALL like the first temple, a TROPICAL temple!), where there's little three-by-three-foot "time storms" all over the place, where Lara finds the place to put the key and she gets sucked into a giant globe then spit back out with the 2nd half of the triangle, where the cult leader gets killed by evil guy, and Lara's old flame is killed by evil guy, and he commands her to help him put the triange togeather, and she figures out the puzzle and puts it togeather, and in a total "Contact" rip-off she has a conversation with her father, and he tells her to destroy the triangle, and she goes back to just before her old flame is killed, and she "turns" the mid-air knife around in the opposite direction so that when time resumes it kills evil guy instead of old flame guy, and she shoots a bullet at the triangle (which is supposedly made of metal from a meteor long ago and is stronger than steel) and it explodes, and everyone leaves, but evil guy -- on the ground bleeding to death, barely able to speak and on his deathbed -- shows Lara her clock with her mother's picture that he stole from her, so she goes back, has the token "final fight" with him (where his previous state of on-his-deathbed is seemingly reversed and he fights with the vigor of a tiger), and she wins, and leaves, and skates out this ice passage using her shoes and dogs pulling her. (whew!)
The final scene shows Lara in a dress, at home, with the butler holding a silver tray with a napkin over it. They eyeball Lara in a dress, then pull the napkin off revealing two guns -- she grabs them, the robot from the beginning comes to life, and it freeze frames Lara mugging her "I'm a bad-ass" mug as it fades out and rolls to credits. Techno music ad nausua througout.
So that's my review. Don't see this movie. Don't support Hollywood crass commercialistic crap. And if you want to see a movie about the manipulation of time, go see the artful, beautifully executed "Memento" instead -- you'll thank me.
-- DLAK
