Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001)

In the movies there is good nonsense and bad nonsense. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider is 100% good nonsense! It won't win any awards or bowl you over with textured and deep themes or performances, but what it will provide you with is a good looking well made slice of pure fun!Angeline Jolie is wonderfully likeable as Lara, plus her English accent is flawless which further endears you to her. Red Dwarf's Chris Barrie pops up as Lara's butler and the two have genuine chemistry together when they are on screen. The film is very well directed by Simon West and it has a very polished sheen to it all plus the pacing is spot on, which for a game adaptation is rarer than hen's teeth.Smashing good fun which is surprisingly well made and well performed too.Highly recommended for a boozy Saturday in or a lazy Sunday on the couch.

It was a good action movie. The movie was based of the popular video game on Playstation 1. I only saw it because I played the game, and I really liked playing it. It was one of my favourite Playstation 1 games back then, so it's inevitable I would eventually see this movie. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider was entertaining. Don't expect too much though. Just enjoy it for what it was. It feels almost similar to the video game.

Plot; A thrill seeking, treasure hunting aristocrat finds herself up against the Illuminati in a race to rejoin two halves of a powerful ancient artifact... or something like that. To date (and excluding the soon to be released Tomb Raider reboot), the live action video game movie adaptation w/the highest Rotten Tomatoes score is 2010's Prince Of Persia w/%36. That's the bar. In short, Hollywood's attempts to bring your favorite video games to life have often been less than successful, w/only the Resident Evil franchise ever finding any sustained success w/a whopping six entries. Released in 2001 and w/a strong whiff of 90s b.o. clinging to its tight, sweat-soaked tank top, Tomb Raider was a modest hit and spawned a sequel, but w/a %20 RT score and a 5.8 rating on IMDb, it's not exactly considered a classic. That it's one of the more well regarded video game adaptations may say more about the genre than the movie itself. That said, it's always been a bit of a guilty pleasure for me (My two decade long crush on Ms. Jolie may play a small part in that). It has a couple of dizzyingly kinetic action scenes and a lean, tight pace that both help you to forget what absolute drivel the story is. Angelina Jolie's Lara Croft isn't a character of any perceptible depth w/her too cool for the room attitude keeping you at arm's length even during the film's laughable attempts at drama, but the actress gamely attacks the material (such as it is). Her Lara doesn't do anything half way, even savagely assaulting the act of taking a shower. I really can't imagine any of this working half as well w/any other actress. A few not-then-but-now familiar faces pop up in Daniel Craig (Bond. James Bond) and Iain Glen (Game of Thrones). The former fails to make much of an impression aside from his extremely dodgy and comically bad American accent, and the latter is your typical generic Euro-villain w/an ill defined plan to blah blah blah. My memory of the sequel is that it's pretty dreadful, and the trailers for the reboot look equally so. I guess for me that makes Lara Croft: Tomb Raider the franchise's gold standard. Wow.

I was 11 at the time, my dad and I seen this back in 2001, and I have to tell you I totally loved it, my dad did as well. I own it on VHS which I found in 2010 when my library had it, and was giving it away, then in 2015 I found a decent copy on DVD at a flea market. The year before the films release, I had recently bought the video game "Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation", for PS1 but never got far on it, hell I still haven't beaten the game yet.Angelina Jolie was a great choice to play Lara Croft, she was my first crush and she's super sexy in this, and around this time she looked her best, my friends and I agree that she looks great looking in it too.Because nowadays she still looks good but she needs to take better care of herself, I want her to make movies for a long time. She also looks like a living incarnation of the character from the original game series, it's quite uncanny to tell you the truth.Now, I don't know much about the the games but I love this movie. This is basically a female version of Indiana Jones, a clone of it, if you you will, but director Simon West did a great job of just making a fun adventure film. I didn't like Con Air but I liked this film very much.On to the action, the action scenes are great, exciting and fun and very well paced, I mean the movie runs at 100 minutes but you don't really notice because the movie is so entertaining, which is good.Her real life father Jon Voight is also good in this but he's mostly in flash back scenes so if your a fan of his, that's a little heads up. I recently seen him in the film "Runaway Train" from 1986, that film was also good too, but more on that for anther review.The rest of the cast is forgettable but I still liked them as well, especially the main baddie called Powell, he was very good in his part. Angelina's fight at the end with Powell was very cool too.Overall a fun adventure film that is pure escapist entertainment from start to finish. I give it a solid 6.8/10. If your thinking of seeing this, you should see it, Angelina is very hot and just so bad ass at the same-time which is fun. Highly recommended.