LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER (2001) **1/2 It all smacks of a movie modeled on a video game, but in the right circumstances even that can be forgiven. I like the idea of a female action hero, kind of a cross between James Bond and Indiana Jones. The concept of the female lead being captured by bad guys, giving rise to difficulties on the part of the hero, is already well represented. It's about damn time we had a lady doing somersaults through gauntlets of bad guys, kicking their guns away and smashing their teeth in! Of course, it's a dangerous role to cast. I mean, it's not the sort of thing to be entrusted to Meryl Streep or Vanessa Redgrave...well, maybe Vanessa, but...my point being that there are a lot of excellent actresses who couldn't pull it off. Diane Keaton no, even Lily Tomlin only maybe. Angelina Jolie was inspired casting. She has the requisite athleticism for the job, and attitude left over to bake a cake! Sorry. Anyway, her upper crust British accent is very good, she's an impressive mixture of elegant and earthy, and she's entirely credible in the same sense that Sean Connery or Harrison Ford were. There's a lot of Bruce Lee in her character, too. Almost as an aside, the plot involves the shadowy Masonic subgroup, the Illuminati, who have either been an inside joke or inside the corridors of power manipulating world events for hundreds of years. The film doesn't bother giving you too much information on them, which is good. Viewers are already going to have developed preconceptions about them, or else all they need to know is that they're kind of weird, and maybe very bad. Anything more would have detracted from the action. They throw in the interesting twist of some organizational power behind the Illuminati, and what might happen in the event of a coup, but the stakes are so wildly metaphysical (or metaphorical) that it's impossible to take it seriously (or literally). I mean, what? You want the secrets of an ultra-secret organization spilled out in a film? Or should some of them be saved for the video game? Isn't it enough for a film to merely hint at indoctrinating you into the possibilities? I mean, you can't get a black belt until you sign up for the class. Right? Usually, but not necessarily.
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