Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001)

Official trailer

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider is the film that turned Angelina Jolie into a global action star and one of the more commercially successful video game adaptations of the early 2000s. Simon West directed. Patrick Massett and John Zinman wrote. Jolie plays Lara Croft, the British aristocrat archaeologist who has been the protagonist of Eidos Interactive’s Tomb Raider game series since 1996. Iain Glen plays Manfred Powell, the Illuminati operative trying to assemble an ancient artifact called the Triangle of Light.

Daniel Craig plays Alex West, a rival tomb raider and Croft’s former lover. Jon Voight plays Lord Richard Croft, Lara’s father, who disappeared on an archaeological expedition years before. The plot involves a planetary alignment, an artifact split into two pieces, and the standard video-game-movie progression of action set pieces in elaborate locations.

I have a soft spot for this one, almost entirely because of Jolie. She walks through it like she owns the franchise, and the movie around her is a standard-issue action picture, competent and forgettable. I find myself waiting through the filler for her next scene.

The film made approximately two hundred and seventy-five million dollars worldwide on a one hundred and fifteen million dollar budget. It was a commercial success that established Jolie among the most marketable action leads of her generation. The 2003 sequel Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life is significantly weaker. The 2018 reboot starring Alicia Vikander is a different matter discussed in the Woke Disasters category. The 2001 film is the canonical Lara Croft on screen.

Angelina Jolie

Jolie was twenty-five during filming. She’d won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar two years earlier for Girl, Interrupted (1999) and was transitioning into mainstream stardom. The role required her to be physically credible as a tomb raider, charismatic enough to carry an action film alone, and committed enough to British aristocratic Lara Croft to make the character recognizable as the video game protagonist. She delivered all three. The performance is the film’s foundation.

Jolie’s physical presence is the film’s main selling point.

The script gives her standard video-game-movie material. Jolie raises the material by committing to the work without apology. The physical training. The accent. The posture of a wealthy British woman who handles firearms professionally. None of this would have worked without absolute commitment from the lead. Jolie’s commitment is the reason the film is watchable. The Cradle of Life sequel shows what the same script looks like without Jolie at peak engagement.

The accent sells it for me. Jolie commits to the posh voice and the posture so completely that I buy her as the woman from the games, and I think a less committed star would have turned Lara into a costume.

The Video Game Adaptation Problem

Video game adaptations have historically struggled because games are participatory and films aren’t. Tomb Raider 2001 partially solved this by treating the games’ iconic visual elements (the dual pistols, the British manor, the elaborate tombs, the puzzle-solving exploration) as production design choices instead of as plot elements. The film preserved what the audience linked to the property visually while writing an original plot instead of adapting any specific game’s narrative.

The approach worked commercially. The audience that knew Lara Croft from the games recognized the character. The audience that didn’t know the games could follow the plot. The compromise is that the film doesn’t feel like any specific Tomb Raider game. It feels like a Tomb Raider film. The distinction is important. The film is in the franchise’s universe instead of being one of the franchise’s stories.

I think the filmmakers made the right call here. Cramming a game’s plot onto the screen would have been a mess, and keeping the pistols, the manor and the tombs gives fans what they came for without boring everybody else.

The Set Pieces

The film’s set pieces include the manor invasion in the opening, the Cambodian temple sequence with the stone monkeys, the planetary alignment finale in Russia, and several smaller intermediate sequences. The set pieces are competently staged. They’re also generic.

Most of them could have been transplanted into any other 2000s action film without significant adjustment. The Cambodia sequence is the most distinctive. The other sequences are interchangeable.

The stone monkeys in Cambodia are the stretch I enjoy. The rest of the action blurs together for me, and by the Russia finale my attention’s drifting. I’d have handed these sequences to a director with more personality.

The lack of distinctive set pieces is the film’s central craft weakness.

The set pieces work as individual sequences but don’t accumulate into a coherent identity. A more distinctive director might have given each location its own visual logic. Simon West is competent instead of distinctive. The film’s success was largely Jolie’s. The set pieces didn’t contribute as much as they should have given the budget.

Is Lara Croft: Tomb Raider worth watching?

6/10. The film works because Jolie works, and I don’t think it’d survive a single scene without her. The script does its job and nothing more, and the set pieces are competent and forgettable apart from Cambodia. That’s what holds it at a 6. Watch it for her and for Daniel Craig before Bond. Skip the sequel.

Frequently Asked Questions