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Saturday, Nov 28, 2009
Plotwise, the movie is a mishmash of the Indiana Jones pictures and "The Matrix," with some airborne martial arts (Lara running around the walls of her manor from a cord attached to her chandelier as if it were an aerial maypole) out of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." (And maybe this is stretching, but the climax, taking place around a giant model of the solar system, calls to mind the fight in front of a gigantic globe that climaxes Samuel Fuller's '50s pulp noir "House of Bamboo.")
Lara has to retrieve some ancient thingamajig that, fitted together during the alignment of the planets (a once every 5,000 years event, we're told), will give unprecedented power over time to whoever possesses it. Her adversaries are a shadowy organization kitted out in vaguely Masonic symbols who, natch, want power over the whole world. There's also a Freudian subplot with Lara haunted by the death of her father (played by Jolie's dad, Jon Voight) years before.
Trying to follow the plot gave me new sympathy for the guy in "Memento": The movie is so nonsensical, jumping from London to Venice to Cambodia to Alaska, that I felt I couldn't remember anything beyond what had happened a few minutes before. As for trying to put it all together, who can be bothered? The movie exists only for the set pieces, and they haven't been done with that much care. The computer graphics effects are remarkably shoddy and cheap-looking and the cinematography, by Peter Menzies Jr. (you mean there's another one?), is murky and dank. There's no wonder in the ancient tombs Lara breaks into and no real plumminess in her posh mansion.
Apart from Noah Taylor (who, as the teenage David Helfgot, stole "Shine" out from under Geoffrey Rush), stuck in the eccentric techie role, the supporting cast is anonymous and undistinguished. Iain Glen, as the main baddie, lets his square jaw, scowl and hair gel stand in for a performance. They're like the Eurotrash version of colorless American character actors like Whit Bissell and Carl Betz.
You can see why Jolie was cast. With her slim build but voluptuous lips and breasts, she has something of the absurdly curvy build of the cartoon Lara Croft. But Croft isn't really a character -- she is never fleshed out beyond her being an orphaned, rich adventuress. There's no distinguishing wit in the conception, no inner torment beyond the generic missing-daddy angle. She's a sex fantasy for teenage boys, but she lacks the distinguishing details that would really fire the imagination, that would make her a real turn-on (in the manner of great pulp characters like Catwoman or James Bond or Tarzan).
And that's why Jolie is all wrong -- because she's so much more than a sex fantasy. She has yet to have a first-rate movie to show off her talents, but in addition to being a wildly talented actress, she is an astonishing presence. In varied roles in "Playing by Heart," the underrated "Pushing Tin" and "Girl, Interrupted," Jolie has been a distinctive mixture of delicacy and aggression, and her thick sensuality seems both commanding and slightly unstable, as if it's about to unmoor her. She does fine with her English accent, and she affects the action-hero confidence quite well, but she's like a guest star in her own vehicle. A movie that gets its only cheers from her bouncing breasts is a particularly poor thing. It's the addition of the other dimensions that have made her a knockout, a turn-on for your heart and head as well as your loins.
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