Why didn’t somebody tell me sooner <em>Tomb Raider</em> is one of the better action movies of recent times? Alicia Vikander had impressed me in “Ex Machina” and “The Light Between the Oceans,” but I also had been gathering an opinion even in recent years that she was limited. How could her lithe physique equate into a major Lara Croft action vehicle? The surprise is that Vikander, with her swimmer bod and kickboxing abs, has the physicality to go along with the fast-and-ready verbal quips. Vikander as Lara Croft is seriously driven to compete and succeed on her quest, while contrast, many contemporary action stars have a phoned-in depth to them.
This is not the video game machine that defined the two Lara Croft movies that Angelina Jolie did. This reboot has a plot that is both preposterous but grounded in “plausibility.” Patriarch Richard Croft (Dominic West) is a global tycoon who owns an endless list of companies, but to keep busy, he does archaeological digs. Seven years after he’s gone missing, Lara Croft uncovers some clues on where to find his last whereabouts on a desolate island in the Far East. Hidden on an island is the tomb of Himiko, inside rests an ancient sorceress who by myth wreaked havoc. Some very angry white men have used slaves to search for the tomb on the island for years, with no luck.
With an obsession to understand the fate of her father, Lara Croft along with a boatman named Lu Ren (Daniel Wu), find themselves on the island where they become chased by the greedy and thieving archaeologists (headed by Mathias Vogel). There is a spectacular action scene with Lara carried down a rapid river with a crashed airplane as the only thing to grab onto at the edge of a waterfall. It has a hanging by her fingernails moment, but Lara is smart enough to use the props around her to narrowly escape. Striking back, Lara wasn’t born a hero, but she finds herself putting together an impromptu insurrection with the aid of her accurate firing bow-and-arrow while her fellow revolters use the machine guns, and before you know it, all this obviously leads to tomb raiding.
Excuse me, but I find the vulnerability and realistic take on Lara Croft, by Vikander, to be more compelling than its previous cinematic origins.
What else is there to like? All of the action pandemonium is done with luminous cinematography. There are some minor jerky close-ups here and there, but mostly director Roar Uthaug (who seems intent to not be your average Hollywood sell-out) knows how to put together a wide angle shot. The big boulder sets and booby-traps within the tomb provide a lot of fun moments. They obviously recall the Indiana Jones pictures, but they’re not copycats, but merely working in the same exotic action tradition. The mystery behind the tomb is hokum and not truly capitalized on (the myth of it is made up in our heads more than anything), and there are a few minutes too many of adversaries tussling around on the ground when a good toss into the abyss would end a fight.
Regardless, <em>Tomb Raider</em> has some gruff humor to spare, quite a few awesome cliffhangers, and it works more like a really cool ’80’s action movie. That’s a compliment.
Nick Frost has a hysterical uncredited cameo as a pawnbroker, and Kristen Scott Thomas is enigmatic as a businesswoman in charge of the Croft enterprises.
118 Minutes. Rated PG-13.
ACTION-ADVENTURE / FANTASY LORE / WEEKEND AFTERNOON MOVIE
Film Cousins: “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981); “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” (1984); “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” (2001); “Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life” (2003).
When <em>Lara Croft: Tomb Raider</em> came out in the summer of 2001, I hardly cared of its RPG origins and quickly decided to not watch it. Over the years, the mystique of Angelina Jolie has appealed to me. And so I turned it on with a fair amount of eagerness to payout some curiosity only to figure out within a few minutes I did not care if I understood the plot. I observed flimsy construction and ludicrous plotting, disabled further by cumbersome and confusing directing by Simon West. I only in the vaguest terms understood what the characters were after, a mystical item that can reverse time called “The Triangle.”
Whatever. But Jolie is an agile and implacable presence, it is funny that our heroine is faster than the machine guns that are firing at her by bad guys, the flamboyant art direction sometimes caught my eye, and there was some stunning footage of places in Cambodia and Siberia, respectively. Since Jolie disowns her real-life father Jon Voight, I was surprised to find him in this. Daniel Craig already looked like he was primed to be 007 down the line. Iain Glen is the head of the Illuminati, and foe.’
I almost liked <em>Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – The Cradle of Life</em>! I do surely am one of the rare people who prefers this ludicrous sequel as a means of mindless fun over the original 2001 release. Angelina Jolie could be doing all her exploits by herself, but insists on the prisoner release of Gerard Butler so together they can trek around the globe to do some retrieving of a deadly Pandora’s Box of sorts—before Ciarán Hinds and other bad guys get to it first. Let me backtrack: I don’t think Jolie’s Lara Croft loves head hunk Butler as Terry Sheridan; she’s just a superior being with an appetite for occasional sex, and Terry is good enough to mess around and play with. But what about the action? Well, it slaps. What I prefer though are the splendid locales of Greece, China, and Africa. Director Jan de Bont (“Speed”) has a splashy but classy sense of bringing out the best from the backdrops.
Eventually though my feeling of “caring” dissipated. Part of it is that I don’t feel a sense of danger, hence, Jolie is so implacable that she’s practically invincible. The plot is pulp, but too silly, and it really doesn’t supercharge my imagination. It’s a shallow thrill machine that, um, occasionally thrills. I’ve had worse junk-food for the brain, though.
Shockingly a minor hit in the year of its release. <em>Angel</em> is a ludicrous and coy sexploitation pic about a high school honor student (Donna Wilkes) whom is a Hollywood streetwalker by night to pay for her prep school. She takes on dispatched advice by her friends of the transvestite and fellow hookers variety, but at least they are more colorfully drawn than our own protagonist. An unexpectedly good performance is by Cliff Gorman as a Police Lt. attempting to sway our Angel off the streets at the same time tracking a serial killer preying on hookers. Back to Wilkes, she is so artless an actress that we never buy she is smart enough to be a top GPA student.
The majority of the movie is so fake titillating that Angel has only two johns the entire movie – encounters that are terminally interrupted before any clothes are undone. But I was in exasperation by the time when a school nerd insults our Angel by trying to buy a date with her for a mere forty bucks.
This pic is worth the slightest of glimpses only if you’re interested in what the 80’s Hollyweird scene might have looked like in its rawness. On the contrary, some phoniness: the bad guy goes down and the movie thinks it has resolved itself, alas, end of movie.
The opening sex scene is missionary style sideways on the bed, with that late afternoon sunlight coming in as a complimentary glow. Two physically beautiful bodies, and gosh, do they know how to grind. Rhythmically. Voice-over informs us they have barely known each other a week. So this is the kind of exciting new romance of two people getting to know each other’s bodies and taking pleasure in each other’s quirks. Subsequent conversations reveal a lack of comprehension of how divergent they are. But the sex is so exciting that, hmm, they will find a way.
<em>Betty Blue</em> has a three-hours director’s cut that I’ve seen twice, gosh, it’s too long for what it is. But for a self-selecting languorous evening, I could do worse. There are gradual character reveals, and once in awhile, the movie finds new ways to be sexy. Jean-Jacques Beineix is the director, most famous for his debut “Diva” (1982), overrated to me.
Béatrice Dalle is the actress who plays Betty, whom is flirty and carnal but succumbs to erratic behavior and outbursts (culminating madness is inevitable). Jean-Hughes Anglade is Zorg, a handyman in a white tank top who services a row of cottages at a beach resort but has a hidden gift as a writer. Betty, once she learns about Zorg, wants him to abandon his working class hunk act and become a full-fledged writer—a number of ideals are had but do not pan out. It’s interesting, at least to me, that Zorg slaps Betty around when she is being irrational – it’s a snapshot of a time of when a man who didn’t know how to handle his woman felt like he needed to get rough with her. But he gets sweeter, more sensitive, more patient, as time progresses.
Which matters not. Let’s just say <em>Betty Blue</em> is a portrait of a very sexual woman whose feral nature befalls her, and while she is capable of appearing classy and gorgeous, she really, tragically, has no self-control. It’s one of <em>those</em> type of romantic dramas. What downgrades the film though is when Zorg does something desperate and reckless (<em>only in the movies</em> criminal behavior) to win back Betty’s interest in life itself, but, eh, matters not. I did not buy it that she’s crazy and he sinks to her level. Thankfully, Beineix’s film has a lot of pretty pictures (and sex appeal) for its type, and that holds my attention.
Misogynistic trash. In <em>The Centerfold Girls</em>, a killer combs through nudie magazines, then hunts and murders them often with a knife, then buries them at the beach (he’s basically angry that women have the gall to arouse men and tease them, and must die for that). Exploitation scenes display girls doing cheesecake photo shoots. We do spend time with a number of women characters, getting to “know them” before they are disposed with. Oddly, we never get to know anything interesting about them because the writing is so bad. The women are one-note objects, but you can tell the actresses are trying attempting to emit some idiosyncratic personality but the director will barely let them.
