Tomb Raider review (contains spoilers): Ok, Tomb Raider, a summer action movie that secretly tries to be more than it is. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an ok movie, but there’s always those little things that start to bug you after a while. First of all, I realize that different people are going to see this for different reasons. Pete will see it because is has Angie in it, Nagle will see it because he’s bored, Chip will see it because Chris Barrie runs around with a shotgun. I saw it because I had nothing better to do. The movie starts off well, a little training with robots (see the trailer) and unfortunately her “party mix” makes it into the actual movie. Ouchy. After that, the first half was pretty good. Fights with bad guys, a cool shoot’em up scene in her garage in which a beautiful James Bond-ish Aston Martin gets trashed (cry), Chris Barrie running around with loafers and a shotgun. Not half bad. Then, after we discover the plot (literally) beneath her stairs, we start getting a pointless back-story (I’ll explain as I go). Laura finds a “clock”, which looks like something out of Stargate, which is the key to unlocking pieces of an artifact with incredible power, her dad life work was trying to find it… we think. Of course the bad guys want it too. And so shenanigans ensue. As we go, we’re introduced to our bad guy who’s working for the secret organization that wants the artifact. He never quite appears evil enough. He lets Laura live, repeatedly, where you’d expect a normal bad guy to try and kill her. Which leads you to believe he’s not all bad. Through all this, Laura is driven to get this artifact and keep it away from the bad guys by her commitment to the memory of her father and his willingness that his work be completed. Cheese. Completely unnecessary. You’ll have to see it to pick out the specifics of what I mean, but lets say this: if Indiana Jones doesn’t need a deep and emotional back story to compel him to raid tombs, neither does Laura Croft. To further this is the “climax” if you’d like to call it that. Our hero finds the pieces, does the right thing, saves the world and then gets the bad guy with his own knife. Dead, of course not. Our bad guy then reveals at the last second that it was indeed him that killed her father and then provokes her to fight him in one last fight scene. Um, hello, you just got stabbed in the chest! Watch the plot take a flying lead at this point. The entire back-story leading up to the admission that he killed her dad was, again, unnecessary. He could have simply tried to kill her and she was fighting back. That would have been fine. Ok, I digress; I don’t want to spoil too much of it for you. Its a fun summer action flick with some problems. But hey, aren’t they all? Go see it if you’re bored, but don’t expect much other than guns and mildly interesting action scenes and the always annoying 13 year olds that need to shout out and comment on everything. Remember, it’s PG-13 for a reason, I just wish I could have figured out what that reason was. Yet another o.k. movie that would have been better R-rated. Later.
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