My Favourite Movies: Lara Croft – Tomb Raider

OK, from time to time I like the odd cheesy movie – especially when they don’t take themselves too seriously or (conversely) don’t play things for laughs. Basically when there’s enough tongue-in-cheek self-knowledge that lets the audience know that they’re in on the joke. This is definitely one of those – indeed one of the better ones, especially when you consider the whole thing is based on a teenager boy’s idea of an ideal computer game. Now, of course, computer game/movie cross-overs haven’t exactly gone very well, indeed most of them belong firmly in the ‘worst films ever made’ category. Fortunately this is head and shoulders above the general background dross. The main reason for this is Lara herself played by the ever fun and nice to look at (if somewhat quirky) Angelina Jolie who very clearly had a lot of fun playing up to her larger than life role.

The storyline is suitably bizarre and completely over the top. It seems that every 5,000 years when the planets line up the two broken halves of an ancient object that can control time – and therefore give its owner ultimate power – can be recovered and brought together. Lara’s father (now dead and playing in dreams/flashbacks by Jon Voight) knows all about it and tells Lara to go find the artifacts so that she can prevent them falling into the hands of the evil Illuminati. That’s basically it – the whole story is there. Then again it’s not need to do much more that tie together some rather impressive set-pieces involving lots of gun fire, ancient monster type creatures, weird ancient impact craters, lots of slow-motion effects, the odd shower scene – both male and female (the male version of Lara is played by Daniel Craig), and a fair bit of humour, cool one-liners and more than one raised eyebrow.

The support cast are pretty good with Iain Glen playing a passable baddie (love him in Games of Thrones), Noah Taylor as the technical genius (also in Games of Thrones!) and the always fun to watch Chris Barrie (not in Game of Thrones) who plays Lara’s faithful butler.

This is not a great film by almost any category. It won’t make you think, it won’t pull at the heart strings and it won’t still much in the way of any deep emotion, it won’t make you sign up to a cause, donate money to charity and it certainly won’t change your life (or even probably enhance it all that much). What you will get, or at least what I got, is about 100 minutes of brainless, mindless entertainment. This film is quite blatantly designed for one thing and one thing only -  to entertain, to be fun, to be throw away fluff that will amuse and then vanish without any kind of aftertaste. Sometimes that’s all a film needs to be, no pretentions, no agenda and no intention of winning or even competing for an Oscar in any category. Sometimes that’s all we, the audience, need too. Tomb Raider hit that make pretty damned well and has probably entertained me half a dozen times so far. It’ll probably do it half a dozen more too.