Strangely Enervating

At first glance, Lady Lara Croft (Angelina Jolie, looking -- as intended -- like a vaguely humanized virtual wet-dream of buffness and pulchritude) seems like a wicked riff on all those drawling British aristo-brats you usually see on the covers of magazines like Hello! and Majesty . . . inbred freaks with weird hobbies and unlimited credit, who apparently spend most of their waking moments try to piss off their staid, Empire-building parents by cultivating rock-star images, complicated sex lives or rampant heroin habits. After all, she lives all alone in an eighty-room mansion, attended only by her veddy proper butler and a Cockney computers/robotics expert apparently meant to stand in for every other geek in the audience, and staves off the creeping boredom inherent in a life of total privilege by rocketing around the world collecting costly, ancient artifacts from dangerous, exotic places; she's also cute as hell, has an encyclopedic knowledge of antiquities, speaks beautifully and carries two huge .45s. Brain, brawn and beauty -- a pin-up for the new millennium. Rock on, milady!

But she's not a real person, in any way, shape or form -- which makes watching Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, the first in a projected series of live-action films based around her exploits, a visually spectacular yet oddly cheerless experience. As a character, with her arrogant belief in her own invulnerability and that big emotional wound at her core -- she spends the movie mourning her long-absent father, Lord Croft (Jon Voight), also a self-taught archaeologist -- Lara has the potential to be a fascinating kind of female Indiana Jones/Sherlock Holmes crossbreed, alternately glamorous, feral, scary and slightly pathetic. But because she originated as the main figure in the world's most successful interactive video game, her attributes must necessarily remain utterly immutable; to grow and change through experience, the way movie protagonists usually do, would turn her into someone other than the archetypical Lara Croft her many fans have come to expect. And this, as we soon discover, cannot be allowed . . . no matter how much Jolie, acting and stunt-performing her firm little ass off, genuinely seems to be trying to make it happen.

The plot of Tomb Raider revolves around a mysterious clock hidden somewhere in Lara's house by her father, which starts running backwards -- "as though it were counting down to something!" -- at the very moment a complete alignment of all nine planets begins to occur. The Illuminati, a secret society whose emblem is the "all-seeing eye", think the clock will lead them to (natch) yet another ancient artifact which can supposedly grant its possessor the power to move back and forth through time; they send sexy Manfred Powell (Iain Glenn) to collect it, which he does, shooting up most of Lara's home in the process. This gets her both mad and interested enough to take off after him, sparking a chase which leads through set-piece after set-piece. All is shot with kinetic aplomb by director Simon West -- previously responsible for the far more satisfyingly cheesy charms of Con Air -- yet strangely enervating, nevertheless.

The verdict? Great soundtrack, great toys, GREAT abs. Shame about the script. It'll probably make a billion dollars anyways, but there's no reason on earth you have to help.