"Lara Croft: Tomb Raider"

This clunker is so inept, it doesn't even provide an opportunity to ogle Angelina Jolie properly.

By Charles Taylor

Jun 15, 2001 | Teenage boys who have played the Tomb Raider video games or read the comic books will want to see the new movie version, which stars Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft, the heroine who might be described as a 2BK girl -- butt-kicking and big-knockered.

And so will older boys, like the ones at the preview screening I attended, who cheered and applauded each and every one of the divine Angelina's jiggles. (Heaven forfend that I should stoop to such a display; let's just say I grinned a lot.)

There are a lot worse reasons to go to the movies than to ogle a beautiful star (and this applies to stars and audiences of all genders and orientations). But "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" is such an inept bundle of work -- crying out for the filmmaking equivalent of Ritalin, but still as sluggish as syrup -- that it doesn't even provide an opportunity to ogle properly. Oh, there's a brief and rather glorious side view of Jolie's bountiful breasts when she steps from the shower. And of course she spends much of the movie in Lara's uniform of tight T-shirts (and apparently, judging from the, uh, looks of things, some sort of nipple restraints) and short shorts.

But our glimpses of Jolie, like our glimpses of everything else, are chopped up and brief in the visually incoherent style of hacks who've aped the form of the music video but mastered none of the internal consistency that you get in the work of video directors like Michel Gondry or feature directors like Baz Luhrmann, who, even at his nuttiest and most maddening, always operates from an idea.

There's no telling what the director, Simon West ("Con Air"), operates from: Judging from the look of the movie, I'd guess one of those mechanical bulls that was featured in "Urban Cowboy." The camera swings around and jerks hither and yon as if it had been mounted to Charo's hips instead of a tripod. And I'm sure that with the use of the paper shredder I received last Christmas I could learn to duplicate Dallas S. Puett and Glen Scantlebury's editing scheme. Let's just say that if spatial relationships are part of what you require to make sense of a movie -- you know, telling where the characters are in proximity to one another, something that tends to help when good guys and bad guys are squaring off -- then maybe it's time to stay home and get started reading "The Count of Monte Cristo" as you've always meant to.

There are a few nifty visual ideas among the movie's bread crumb scatterings: a shot of Lara firing a rifle as the motorcycle she's riding becomes airborne, another of her popping a wheelie on her front tire to pivot the bike around and smack a baddie in the head with the rear wheel or a bit lifted from Ray Harryhausen where statues of monkey warriors and a giant many-armed Shiva figure come to life. But they're shot close in and fast, and there's no time to luxuriate in them, no way of telling how close or distant Lara is to the villains on her tail. One sequence should be delirious: We see Lara, in the foyer of her English country manor, suspended from bungee cords, doing midair somersaults and swings as Bach's Piano Concerto in F Minor plays on the soundtrack. But again, West chops up the sequence, cutting from angle to angle instead of allowing it to flow and allowing the audience to indulge in our fantasies of being freed from gravity.

Next Page: An "Indiana Jones"/"Matrix" mishmash

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