Filmmakers for
”
Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life,
”
currently playing at premiere Cinemas, were headed in the right
direction when they started making this movie but kind of lost
track of where they were going along the way.
Filmmakers for “Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life,” currently playing at premiere Cinemas, were headed in the right direction when they started making this movie but kind of lost track of where they were going along the way.
I do applaud Director Jan De Bont (“Basic Instinct,” “Minority Report” and “Hunt for Red October”) for trying to make this latest installment of the Tomb Raider franchise everything the original movie wasn’t.
This two-hour and 10-minute release from Paramount Pictures is more in depth, travels to more exotic locations and has a better script and it includes bigger and more exotic stunts.
The only problem is that for all of its good intentions and its enhancements, this movie just does not work as well together as the original did.
There are several places where the film just plain drags and you can almost visibly see audience members losing interest in it.
De Bont apparently gets confused about who the Lara Croft character is.
I think he strays too far from the video game roots, which this movie is based on, where Lara Croft is a savvy, archeologist out to recover artifacts that no one else can.
Her intensive personal training helps her overcome obstacles that other people could not make it through.
However, in this movie, filmmakers can’t make up their minds if they should stick with Lara Croft the archeologist, or try to turn her into a female version of James Bond.
They apparently opted to go with the latter, giving Croft, a British national, an assignment from MI6 – the British version of the CIA, and the same agency Bond works for.
Acting on a request from the queen, Croft is sent to recover Pandora’s box, from the ancient Greek myth the young girl who released all the evils of the world from a box given to her by the gods.
A it turns out, this box really does exist and Croft has to get to it before a ruthless international arms dealer, who also specializes in the sale of biological and chemical weapons to the underworld, can get his hands on it.
What I found to be a big problem with this movie is that the plot line feels like an inept rehashing of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
Some of the parallels in the plot seem too strong to be just coincidence.
This film has too much violence and some sexuality for child viewers.
