Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
John Robie is a terribly dirty man. Yet for some reason, he wasn't able to raise a pulse for the sight of Angelina Jolie in shorts with her incredible inflating and deflating boobs during TOMB RAIDER. I personally won't be reviewing this film until next Friday because I saw it at an official press screening, and I'm under embargo until then. Just gives me a week to warm up my pinata stick for Simon "Stop Me Before I Kill Another Script" West...
Tomb Raider isn’t just a bad movie. It isn’t just an abysmally bad movie. It isn’t Dungeons and Dragons make-fun-of-the-idiocy bad, either. It’s a curtain of boredom that hangs before your eyes for near an hour and a half and even the flickering of the theater lights as they stir back to life after the final reel does nothing to erase the blankness of the film. It’s almost like waking from a dream, wondering where you’ve been the past few hours and wondering why you can’t quite put the random shapes and colors from your memory into words. You can’t put them into words because there’s no substance to them because they never really existed. Watching Tomb Raider you get the same feeling; it doesn’t feel like it exists. It’s an inanimate gunk of movie pabulum, boring and uninspired and never once stirring.
The murmur of a good film is silenced right around the time the cacophony of fast cuts and uncaring, nonliving characters and boom boom boom action kicks in, action that’s neither invigorating nor involving. It’s all blank stares and looks of longing and “let’s go on to the next big explosion” here, the kind of stuff you might chance upon late night while skimming Cinemax and its environs. It’s not that the pulse of Tomb Raider is weak; it’s that there’s no pulse at all. Thirty minutes into the film you’ll find yourself wondering what you’re watching, and forty minutes in you’ll find yourself wondering why. Why was the movie made (to make a ton of cash), why was the far superior script abandoned for this drivel (because the producers had no clue what they had and the 1-2-3 set piece build-up has seeming been grafted into their grey matter) and why is Angelina Jolie, an actress that has proved that she can be compelling and deeply interesting, here so bland, boring and, often, insipid? There’s nothing in the movie that stirs save one moment in a temple, and there’s a whole lot of temples. But the Harryhausen-esque scene dies in a flicker of over-worked CG and bad pacing and poor buildup, relegating what should be a wondrous movie monster into a slow-motion Vishnu wannabe that looks abysmally awful as it’s destroyed in exactly the same manner as any sane body will figure at the beginning of the scene. There are no surprises here, no spark, and when you’re making big summer action, that’s the biggest sin of all.
There are hours long explanations of plot points, there are huge chunks of the movie that are nothing more than pointless exposition, and there are treks to Buddhist temples so Laura can be cured of a bullet wound. A bullet wound... There’s a whole plot about pieces of a meteor made into magic by an ancient civilization and wonder of wonders, time now can be bent with the powers of this unknown metal coupled with an ancient, unknown clock. Wonderful. Maybe, just maybe, we can use this clock, go back in time, and pierce the heart of the first person that suggested the bad guys in the film be stone monkeys.
There are love interests that make no sense and that warrant nary a nerve burst of care, there are bad guys that wouldn’t befit an episode of MacGuyver, and there are lightening metal balls that fall and explode as if the ending of The Avengers was grafted out with a rusty scalpel and placed smack dab at the end of this summer event. There are creatures wasted because it’s impossible to see what they look like because blink and you’ll miss them, and there is ridiculousness of the highest nature as Laura smashes a wall of her house because she hears a clock ticking. A house, mind you, that’s been outfitted with every single modern motion sensor and flashy electronic deal known to man yet still...there’s room for a big catacomb of ancient relics. Right beneath the stairs, no less. You probably have no idea what I'm talking about. Don’t worry; you will. You’ll see the film, and you will. And instead of laughing you’ll instead roll your eyes, and wonder what else might be playing at the cineplex that you might be able to sneak into because believe me brother, it doesn’t get any better.
Everything here has been frittered away, all the skin and muscle stripped and what we’re left with is a worse than incomprehensible; it’s totally uninspired. It plods, thuds, and trips over itself as it lumbers towards the final drape of credits, and never once is there anything to make you care about what’s going on.
If you have to justify the coolness of your movie with terms like “bungee ballet” and “stone monkeys” you know you’re in trouble. If nothing else the film is good as a test; if a friend tells you that it wasn’t that bad you can very readily relegate his opinion on all matters film to the bottom of the barrel. Yes yes, my name is John Robie and women are the game. I’m still not sleeping with Cindy Crawford if she shows up at my door donned in a dress of pig shit.
And for that matter, I ain't touchin' Angelina Jolie, neither.
