Review of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider

Introduction

Every teenage boy`s favourite computer game character Lara Croft - the star of the successful Tomb Raider series of games - arrives on the big screen complete with trademark tight shorts and top - filled by Angelina Jolie.

There aren`t too many computer games that have successfully jumped medium to movies, but Tomb Raider stood a very good chance, itself loosely based on the exploits of Indiana Jones, substituting a busty brunette for Harrison Ford`s Indy. In this movie adaptation, Lara searches for the Triangle of Light, fending off the Illuminati who believe that the ancient relic will give them the power to control time.

Video

The video is presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen and is of good quality - falling short of reference titles due to some film grain at times, but reasonably sharp and detailed.

As you might expect from a big-budget movie based on a computer character, the action sequences are big, noisy and way over the top - although they don`t quite fall into the same laughable category as The Mummy Returns. The scenes are well shot, and make fashionable use of clever camera angles to show off the action, and of course Jolie`s curves. However, most of the sequences are over long and become boring after a while - behind all the effects there is absolutely nothing new on display here.

Audio

The sound comes in Dolby Digital 5.1 and is of average quality - again failing to meet the standard set by others recently. The dialogue level is set too low whilst at times the effects are set too high resulting in an unbalanced soundfield. Also, the 5.1 mix doesn`t appear to provide much separation, either left/right or front/rear - given the amount of gunfire, there`s little in the way of bullets flying around the room for example.

Features

There are a reasonable amount of extras on the disc, although whether you would really want to sit through them is a different matter altogether. There are various interviews and featurettes, all of the backslapping variety and a sick-bucket is definitely necessary at times. There are also deleted scenes, a director`s commentary and a music video of U2`s "Elevation".

The disc is packaged in a silver Amaray case, which contains a colour flyer with some pictures of Lara and details of the stingy 12 chapter breaks.

Conclusion

Quite how you can take the promising storyline, an established and popular cult character, a great actress and a huge budget and produce one of the worst films for years is not explained anywhere in the extra material. The fact that the movie grossed over $130m in the US box office given the long list of failings is equally bizarre - I`d guess that $125m of that comprised males under 30 who went along only to ogle Jolie`s figure.

The film is quite staggeringly bad, almost unwatchably so at times, with a combination of an atrocious script, ridiculous plot and bad acting combining to deliver a film that is actually worse than Super Mario Brothers - another infamous game to movie conversion.

If you really must watch this drivel, hire it out - almost anything else is more worthy of purchase.