Anyone who saw Lara Croft: Tomb Raider will agree that it didn’t make a great deal of sense. That apparently didn’t matter to the people who flocked to the multi-plex to see Angelina Jolie run in slow motion and hang upside down while fighting bad guys. Enough people agreed that trifles like plot and believability were secondary to seeing Jolie battling a frantic robot that a sequel was commissioned.
I’m tickled to report that Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life not only has one of the longest titles of the summer, but also has a story that almost makes sense! Not that we demand much from these movies. The story is simply a peg to hang Ms Jolie’s bikini on while temples crash, motorcycles rev and people defy gravity, flying through the air as Lara Croft punches a shark. It’s a popcorn movie, not Dostoyevsky, although at times this movie feels as long as a Russian novel.
Here’s the story as I remember it… Somewhere between diving in a skintight silver wetsuit and riding side-saddle on her English country estate archeologist Croft learns that a shining golden globe – which she had in her possession, then lost – is actually a map to the mysterious Cradle of Life where the famous Pandora’s Box is said to be hidden. While wearing a natty kimono Croft learns that former Nobel Prize winner and “modern day Dr. Mengele” Jonathan Reiss (Ciaran Hinds), has the orb and is close to uncovering its secret. She must don a skin-tight motorcycle jacket and find him, before he discovers the deadly secret of Pandora’s Box and sells its poison to the highest bidder.
For support Lara entices an old flame named Gerrard (Terry Butler), currently doing time in a Siberian ultra-high security prison for crimes against the state. Looking fetching in a white fur trimmed winter coat she offers him freedom and a great deal of money to help her. Thus begins their whirlwind world tour of destruction as the dynamic duo travel to Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Africa in their attempt to recover the globe and unlock its secrets.
Dutch director Jan de Bont (Speed, Twister) makes good use of the scenery – both Ms Jolie and the international locales – showcasing the beauty and the danger of each. A nicely staged gun battle involves inventive use of a neon sign and a pole vault to a helicopter; another scene shows the couple “flying” over the skyline of Shanghai. In both cases de Bont actually shows us the action. If Charlie’s Angels director McG had shot those scenes we would have seen a glimpse of the helicopter blade, a quick cut of someone flying through the air and heard the whoosh of a bullet as it cut through the air. My major complaint with recent action sequences is that we don’t actually get to see anything. It’s all fast cuts and loud techno music. Jan de Bont avoids that trap, allowing the scenes to play out, and while sometimes they drag on a bit too long, at least we know what we are looking at.
Angelina Jolie plays Lara Croft like a Barbi doll come to life, batteries, but no heart included. She is powerful, sexy, agile, adventurous and no-nonsense (as Gerrard learns the hard way), but like the videogame character she is based on, doesn’t seem to have any emotional life under the pretty façade. Unlike that other famous cinematic archaeologist, the quirky Indiana Jones, there is no vulnerability to Croft at all.
Jolie’s beautiful face is a blank slate, expressionless for most of the film with only the occasional arching of an eyebrow to remind us that a real person lives beneath her perfect skin. Perhaps in the foreseeable Lara Croft Tomb Raider 3: The Saga Continues In More Exotic Lands she will transcend her computer generated origins, and we’ll get a glimpse of the real person behind that raised eyebrow.
Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life is like its name, a bit too long, and kind of silly, but a vast improvement on its predecessor.
Putting Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, the two best looking people in Hollywood—strike that, the world—in one movie is a no-brainer, so now the question is, do they have chemistry? Happily, they do, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the movie that broke up Jennifer Aniston’s marriage to Pitt and gave us the term “Brangelina,” works, not because of its outlandish story, but because of the performances from the two leads. They play married and highly paid assassins who don’t know what the other does for a living. They discover the truth when they are ordered to kill one another. The movie is kind of schizophrenic—on one hand it is a study of a marriage that is eroding, falling apart because of a lack of intimacy, and on the other it is a flat out action film with crazy action sequences. The two play off one another well—my favorite exchange between them happens when she accidentally stabs him with a knife in the leg. “We’ll talk about this later,” he mumbles as he pulls the knife out of his leg. If you liked the black humor of the Jack Nicholson / Kathleen Turner film Prizzi’s Honor, you’ll like Mr and Mrs Smith.
Movies don’t come more “ripped from the headlines” than “Salt.” The story of a sleeper agent living in the United States unfolded in real life recently but wasn’t nearly as exciting or as silly as its on-screen counterpart.
When we first meet Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie) she is an American hero after surviving a brutal interment in North Korea. “Do you know what she’s done for her country?” asks her boss (Liev Schrieber). Actually we don’t, but she did have a nasty black eye when she was rescued. She’s married to Michael Krause—the world’s leading arachnologist—and is happily riding a desk at an undercover CIA office in Washington. Everything suddenly changes one day, however, when a Russian defector named Orlov (Daniel Olbrychski) shows up with a wild tale of a sleeper agent named Evelyn Salt who is going to assassinate the Russian president in order to trigger a war. Accused, she makes a run for it—searching for her husband and the truth.
“Salt” has a Cold War inspired plot that even James Bond creator Ian Fleming, no stranger to elaborate plot musings—he once created a villain who killed his victims with liquid gold—would have rejected as over-the-top.
Logic flies out the window early on, leaving room only for outlandish plot turns unlikely twists and an ending that can only be described as preposterous.
That said, “Salt” is a lot of fun but it’s not a story that will hold up to a great deal of scrutiny. Hitchcock would have referred to it as a refrigerator movie. It seems to (mostly) make sense while you are watching it, but later, when you are home in front of the fridge making a snack and thinking about the film you realize it doesn’t hold up. But that’s OK when the action is as relentlessly paced and fun as Phillip Noyce delivers here. The escalation from accused spy to fugitive happens very quickly—it’s exaggerated—but once the action starts it covers for the trite dialogue—”You’re not safe with me!”—and silly plotting.
The part of Evelyn Salt was originally written for Tom Cruise, who eventually walked away because he felt the story too closely resembled his “Mission Impossible” movies. Good thing too. Cruise would have brought his usual hero persona along with him, taking away some of the down-and-dirty pleasure of the film. Besides it’s way more fun to see Angelina Jolie jump from building to building and use dead guys as a silencer for her gun. Cruise would have insisted on less good-or-evil ambiguity. Jolie oozes bad girl vibes and it works very well here. As Evelyn she’s two parts bombshell, one part “MacGyver” and all badass. She has more lives than Felix the Cat, but that’s all part of the fun.
Less than fun is the end of the movie. There will be no spoilers here, but the preposterous finale makes me think that a.) it was written to set “Salt” up for a sequel—can “Salt and Pepper” be far behind? or b.) Noyce didn’t know how to end it and went for the easiest and least logical way out.
“Salt” is silly fun. A summer spy romp that works as an action film but doesn’t bear up to scrutiny.
“The Tourist” is a movie that asks the question, Would one kiss from Angelina Jolie be worth risking your life for? Many would think yes, including Johnny Depp who plays the hapless eponymous character in this new thriller from Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, the director of the Oscar winning “The Lives of Others.”
In this twisty-turny thriller Johnny Depp plays Frank, an American math teacher on a train to Venice who gets caught up in some international intrigue involving a missing banker, Scotland Yard and some murderous Russians when Angelina Jolie sets him up as a decoy to throw the police off the whereabouts of her fugitive boyfriend.
“The Tourist”—a remake of the 2005 French film “Anthony Zimmer”— plays like “Strangers on a Train” meets “True Lies” with a hint of “CSI: Italy” mixed in for good measure. It doesn’t pack the kind of movie star magic promised by the pairing of Depp and Jolie—he’s too passive for most of the film for sparks to really fly—and the storyline feels like a “Matt Helm” movie idea reject, but taken for what it is, a stylishly forgettable Euro romp, it’s a bit of fun.
Despite Depp’s presence Jolie is the star of the film. The camera fawns over her, luxuriating in her every seductive blink, curve and hair flick. Depp falls for her, as does everyone else, including the police who have her under surveillance who debate whether she is wearing underwear or not. Take her out of the equation and there’d be a whole lot less reason to watch the movie.
The bones for the story of Changeling, the twenty-eighth film from director Clint Eastwood, are borrowed from the infamous Wineville Chicken Coop Murders, a kidnapping and murder case from late 1920s Los Angeles. The sensational child murder case made headlines around the world, shining a spotlight on police corruption by the LAPD and making a media star of Canadian-born serial killer Gordon Stewart Northcott. Eastwood personalizes the story by focusing on the mother of one of the victims, Christine Collins (a goth looking Angelina Jolie).
Changeling’s twisted tale picks up steam when single mom Collins comes home after working some overtime hours to an empty house. Her ten-year-old son Walter is gone without a trace; the front door is locked, his lunch is still in the ice box and his bed undisturbed.
Cut to five months later. The LAPD gives Collins the happy news that they have located her son and that he is alive and well. Trouble is the boy they bring home is not her son. When she protests the police, concerned for the bad press her story would generate, try and convince then coerce her to accept the boy. When she refuses they have her committed to a mental hospital that makes Shock Corridor look like a hotel spa. Luckily she has anti-police corruption crusader Rev. Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich) on her side. With his help Collins exposes the LAPD cover-up and corruption and tries to get to the bottom of what actually happened to her son.
At two hours and twenty minutes Changeling takes its time to tell the story, expertly weaving the disparate elements—the disappearance, the police corruption and the unexpected serial killer angle—into one seamless, elegantly directed movie. It’s a complex story but one that is carefully laid it out, and while it would likely have been possible to trim a few of the “I want my son back!!” scenes, by and large there isn’t any fat here.
Eastwood sets the tone in the film’s opening seconds by draining the picture of any bright colors. This bleak palate—at odds with sunny California’s sparkling reputation—establishes the somber feel that permeates every scene.
Angelina Jolie’s resemblance to Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride embodies that gloomy feel; her face a sallow shell of the usually beautiful woman caught by paparazzi in the pages of Us Weekly. She’s in almost every scene of the film, delivering strong work as a mother who refuses to give up hope, but for every powerful Oscar bait moment there is another where she veers toward melodrama, relying a bit too heavily on the silent movie five poses of female subjugation technique. The delicate hand clutching at her mouth in despair is effective once, but on repeated use loses impact. It’s a performance that ranges from moving to shrill, but, nonetheless, will likely be nominated come Academy Award time.
Of the other above–the-title cast members Amy Ryan hands in solid work in her small role as a wrongly imprisoned prostitute and John Malkovich is showy, but just a bit too creepy as the fiery Rev. Briegleb. Of the new comers Eddie Alderson does stand-out work as a teen wracked with guilt while regular Law and Order guest star Jeffrey Donovan is suitably evil as Capt. J.J. Jones, the scheming and manipulative policeman.
Changeling often succeeds more as a portrait of a time and place—the recreation of 1920s Los Angeles is breathtaking, and the misogynistic attitude toward women makes the males on Mad Men seem enlightened—rather than a true-life crime drama, but despite its tendency toward melodrama Eastwood has created the first big movie of Oscar season.
A Mighty Heart dramatizes the manhunt launched in Pakistan when jihadists kidnapped Wall Street Journalist Daniel Pearl in January 2002.
Based on wife Mariane Pearl’s memoir of the same name, the story begins with Pearl and his pregnant wife traveling to Karachi to investigating a possible tie between “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and Sheikh Gilani. Despite repeated warnings to exercise caution and meet the Sheikh, who had connections with radical Islamic groups in the past, in a public place, Pearl is kidnapped and later brutally murdered.
The bulk of the film is Mariane Pearl’s account of the five week investigation that led up to her husband’s death. Call it CSI: Karachi, it is a police procedural with tension, excitement, but most of all, heart.
Director Michael Winterbottom’s gritty style and ever-moving camera gives the film a documentary feel and the sense of urgency of a current news story. Even though we know how the sad saga ends there is never a sense of resignation or inevitability to the story. It feels as though it is unraveling in real time, as if a news crew had unprecedented access to Pearl and the investigation. It’s harrowing, unvarnished stuff, but utterly compelling.
At the center of the film is a barely recognizable Angelina Jolie as Mariane. She is literally in disguise as Pearl’s wife—hair curled tight, minimal make-up and a French/Cuban accent—and leaves the well defined Angelina Jolie persona in the dressing room, handing in a forceful performance (maybe her best ever) that is sure to garner awards.
A Mighty Heart is a demanding film. Unsentimental, yet heartfelt, it manages to deliver emotion and realism without a hint of manipulation on the filmmaker’s part.
