Tag Archives: Noah Taylor

Movies, Reviews

Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003)

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Yeah, I'd have that look on my face, too.
Yeah, I’d have that look on my face, too.

I won’t pretend I’m some knight-errant, riding in on a white horse to save Tomb Raider. I know that, as a hetero male nerd, I’m supposed to love Lara Croft, but I’ve despised every game in this franchise and things only got worse as it went on, each iteration more shamelessly copy-pasted than the last.

Then the old girl almost died in 2003, when Core Design and Eidos Interactive released the sixth game in the series, Angel of Darkness. It combined the tank-like controls and five-story screaming death drops of the previous five games with a headscratchingly stupid plot involving magic paintings, a camera that’s as bent on Lara’s death as the antagonists, and more bugs than Jurassic Park’s computer systems. Continue reading Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003) →

Movies, Reviews

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001)

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Lara keeps a look out for falling plot contrivances.

As Tomb Raider opens, we find Lara Croft (Angelina Jolie, of course) hanging suspended from a rope. Not even her intricately woven braid stirs. Then, in what will quickly become a matter of course for this film, she runs-jumps-flips-climbs her way through an ancient looking cave of faux ruins and blows the holy hell out of the ultra-advanced robot assassin that serves as her “sparing partner.” All in a flash-bang opening action sequence designed to drive home a singular point: that Lara Croft is a Badass. Needless to say, the sequence accomplishes its goal…so, I asked myself, what the hell is the rest of the movie supposed to do?

Spiral ever downward, apparently. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Angelina Jolie is Lara Croft, the Tomb Raider, only child to “legendary” archeologist Lord Croft (Jon—Anaconda—Voight). So when she’s not destroying her own robots or lounging about the eighty-plus rooms of her ancestral home Lara likes to gallivant around the globe and engage in a spot of grave robbing, stealing priceless artifacts and…doing…something…with them. If you don’t live under a rock, you probably already knew this, or could figure it out from the incredibly-obvious title. {More}