Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
Softcore Porn with an excuse plot based on low-rent conspiratorial James Bond, with just the bare minimum amount of tomb raiding to be considered an Indiana Jones inspiration.
The evil Illuminatti boilerplate conspiracy wants a time machine … not out of a DeLorean. This is a mystical remnant of an Atlantean civilisation. Misusing it (how?) lead their capital to be destroyed, but their remaining institutions managed to nuke that time machine, by splitting it into two parts: Cambodia and Siberia.
On Cambodia, it’s some unexplored temple deep in the jungle, but after Lara gets away with the loot, she jumps into a waterfall and swims into Angkor Wat? It’s Fast and Furious all over again.
There’s a kind of set piece in each of the locations, with some lousy CGI and some jiggling physics that cannot be faked, as proven in the post-bath scene. There’s another fakeout bath scene, but it’s Daniel Craig buck naked, for the ladies.
It’s not a joke that it gives an areola of softcore, but it’s PG sexuality and violence. Bloodless carnage and innuendo.
It’s an abuse to say there are more characters. The butler is comically serious, and the tech guy is a nerdy neurotic. Lord Croft is really her father, now Trumper Nutter Jon “Megalopolis” Voight.
Wait, wait a minute. Lara has a Totenkopf belt buckle? This in emphasised! What the hell‽
I genuinely thought the music choices were taking the piss, it’s completely preposterous.
The opening action scene is pretty lousy, considering they don’t even have the guts to use Absurd’s Fluke straight up, it’s some kind of remix. But nothing can prepare you for the closing shots, Basement Jaxx used unironically.
Where’s your head at, indeed.
Still much better than Temple of Doom.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.