...something like “Tomb Raider 2” shows Lara Croft riding a motorcycle on the The Great Wall of China without commenting on that landmark’s deterioration.
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The film "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" generated quite a bit of revenue during the summer of 2001, so it seems to have made sense for Paramount and Mutual Film Company to create a sequel. However, "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider--The Cradle of Life" underperformed at the box office, and everyone began blaming everyone else. The film companies blamed the videogame´s makers for making progressively worse game sequels, and the videogame´s makers blamed the film companies for making a bad movie. You know what? Everybody´s right, lol.
The truth of the matter is that there are few videogames that are incredible, life-influencing experiences. People usually play videogames to have some visceral, proxy fun engaging in activities that aren´t normally experience-able in real life (killing thousands of opponents with explosives, extreme street racing, etc.). That´s perfectly fine given the utility of videogames, but that sort of mentality doesn´t work with movies, which require some thought input from both makers and spectators in order to be involving. You see, with a videogame, all you have to do is put the gamer in the game, and that´s it. With a film, though, the movie has to draw the viewer´s attention with either a story or with ideas. "Tomb Raider 2" has a terrible story and no new ideas, and it does not have a fresh way of serving its terrible stories and lack of new ideas.
I could give you a plot rundown (what happens at a specific moment during the film´s running time), but nothing happens in the movie that would lend itself to a plot analysis. Therefore, all you need to know about the story is that Lara Croft (Angelina Jolie) has to find Pandora´s Box before an evil scientist (Ciaran Hinds, "The Sum of All Fears") does in order to prevent him from unleashing a terrible plague. This gem of a concept is an excuse for characters to blast the crap out of each other with various guns, and we get to see Jolie doing a couple of nifty stunts. "Tomb Raider 2" is a better movie than its predecessor (mainly because the first entry was so poorly edited), but that´s not saying much. I know that my colleague John Puccio gave "TR1" a "5", but I would´ve given it a "4".
To be sure, everything looks great due to the filmmakers´ technical proficiency, but there is a serious lack of artistry. When the script doesn´t bother giving us reasons to care or root for its characters, then no excitement can be generated by even the most daring of stunts (regardless of whether they were performed by stuntpeople or created with computers). This is all the more painful because the movie offers several beautiful vistas, but there´s nothing that compels us to make emotional attachments to the beauty of the film´s locations. (By the way, I don´t know why they did it, but the filmmakers took a page from "Die Another Day"--the worst Brosnan Bond outing if not one of the worst Bond films ever--and often used the "slow-down-then-resume-normal-film-speed" gimmick. It looks terrible.)
Finally, while Angelina Jolie has an athletic, sculpted body, her face doesn´t look like that of a "hero". I´ve always thought that her angry face would allow her to play a great villain, so I´m still waiting to see the "promise" and "talent" that some critics seem to find in her performances.
In the "Indiana Jones" movies, an archaeologist has to defeat bad guys in the race to obtain an object. The basic pitch is the same for both "Indiana Jones" and "Tomb Raider". However, "Indiana Jones" is a superior series because it comments on things in life beyond the narrative itself. For example, the "Indiana Jones" movies actually comments on something such as Nazism (for example, in "The Last Crusade" when Indiana and Elsa Schneider talk about the burning of books by the Nazis), but something like "Tomb Raider 2" shows Lara Croft riding a motorcycle on the The Great Wall of China without commenting on that landmark´s deterioration. It´s these kinds of missed opportunities that make the "Tomb Raider" movies worthless to anything except for Angelina Jolie´s bank account.
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[release]11109[/release]