It is the season of the crowd-pleasers. That’s because it’s summer in the northern hemisphere, though we’re freezing down here. We’ve had Pearl Harbor, The Mummy Returns and Shrek; still to come are Evolution, Bridget Jones’s Diary and – oh dear – Dr Doolittle II. This week’s blockbuster, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider should do very well indeed.
The movie, based on the mega-selling computer game, is the latest advance in the kind of apocalyptic hokum the Indiana Jones movies made so popular. The innovation of the game – making a woman the central character – is also new to the archaeological-adventure genre, though Rachel Weisz did what she could in The Mummy Returns. Angelina Jolie puts sexy flesh on the animated bones of Lara Croft, the British aristocrat doing in the 21st century what so many adventurers of the 18th and 19th did.
That is, when not ensconced in her palatial country home (complete with fake tombs and deadly robots for practising on – she has an apparently unlimited budget), she trots around the globe retrieving mystically endowed artefacts from various ancient tombs and temples. The movie does not let us stop to wonder whether this is a plausible pursuit in this day and age, let alone a laudable one. The filmmakers would have us believe Lara Croft is a ”role model” (strong woman, etc), but she is really a throwback to an age in which upper-class freebooters pillaged the treasures of ancient cultures, shipping them back home to be displayed in museums that were basically signifiers of imperial power.
But then, despite its well-spoken British pretensions, Tomb Raider is an American movie, and the United States now occupies the position of the European empires of the 18th and 19th centuries, so this makes perfect sense. Americans may not actually be schlepping the Parthenon back to New York (though I’m sure they would if they could), but they are metaphorically raiding other cultures, modern and historic, for whatever entertainment value or decorative potential they possess, usually without any sense of those cultures’ individuality or integrity. Here, the ancient world is an exotic piggybank of images to be digested by the omnivorous cultural juggernaut that so enthrals global audiences.
Such thoughts, however, are perhaps too much for Tomb Raider to bear, and one must descend to its level. It’s a highly entertaining movie, with plenty of eye-grabbing action, as Lady Croft competes with the Illuminati for some relics that have a special power now that a major planetary alignment and a solar eclipse are on the go. Clearly, this is a big moment. The end is nigh. Or something. The Illuminati waited 5 000 years for this moment, but now they need these arcane items within the week. Perhaps they were too busy plotting to infect Africa with HIV.
At any rate, this preposterous hocus-pocus gives our heroine the opportunity to engage in many a stirring battle (including a fabulous one involving bungee cords in the foyer of her mansion), blasting away with her twin pistols at anything that moves, whether flesh or stone. The violence is bloodless, though, so the kiddies won’t have to be kept away. And there’s no sex, either, though after the epic fights, which usually end in the implosion of the relevant temple, Lara tends to breathe a satisfied sigh, like someone who’s just had a good quickie.
Jolie does a good job, despite lips that clearly need liposuction and the exigencies of having to deal with a dead father, in the form of Jon Voight with a plummy British accent. She manages lines such as ”You’re with the Illumanati!” confidently, and gets decent support from her co-stars, among them Chris Barrie as her butler, Noah Taylor as her in-house techie and Daniel Craig as a rival ”archaeologist”, with whom there is a dash of sexual tension. This could be developed in future instalments of the franchise. She also needs a more compelling villain to go up against – here, Iain Glen’s baddie is simply irritating, coming across like a bad parody of Roger Moore.
As it stands, though, it makes great entertainment of the non-demanding variety; it’s trash, but it’s well-made trash. Compared with The Mummy Returns, which was enjoyable in a semi-engaging sort of way, it is very good indeed, a more inventive recycling of the Indiana Jones clichés. One can’t help feeling, though, that its poster should have a slogan something like this: ”Travel to exotic climes, visit ancient temples … and destroy them.”