Lara Croft: Tomb Raider A Movie Review	MPAA Rated - PG-13 It's 1:41 Long A Review by The Dude on the Right

"Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" gives us probably the only person who could pull off transforming the busty, kick-ass video game champion onto the big screen and that person is Angelina Jolie. She had the sass, she had the figure, and she and her stunt people had all of the moves. The story, well, plays out just like a video game. This one has the bad guys trying to recover these two pieces of a triangle and put them back together at just the right time so that they can control the world (putting the triangle back together gives that person the ability to travel through time, thus changing any event in history that doesn’t fit with their master plan). It’s up to Lara to get in the way of their plan at the request of her father (Jon Voight) in a letter from the grave (he’s dead). And honestly, that’s about all you really need to know about the plot because, well, the only purpose of the plot seems to be to have Lara have adventures you would find if you bought the video game series.

Why do I say this? Well, the movie gives you cool locations, from the jungle to the arctic, just like the games. The movie also gives you Lara in skimpy outfits, just like the games. The movie also gives you a big, bad monster character (in this movie’s case a giant Buddha-like monster, made of stone) that you have to have all of your weapons to kill (Lara needed a few more gun clips) or come up with an ingenious use of your surroundings (Lara does), just like the games. And quite honestly, if you’ve ever played video games similar to the Tomb Raider series, you know that after you accomplish the first challenge there is the movie scene during the game where your character discusses the next course of action – the movie had those too. Quite honestly, if you could somehow take your Tomb Raider game, set it so that Lara would do everything needed to get through and save the world automatically, you would have the same thing as the movie. But I still liked it.

"Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" doesn’t really give you any surprises, gives you a pretty dorky story, but will give you some really cool action sequences Angelina is smokin’ hot in this role. What else to you want?

So why do I think it could have been more? I guess because I wanted a story like an Indiana Jones type with a kick-ass hero, or in this case heroine, kinda like Neo in "The Matrix." I got the kick-ass heroine, but it’s the story that destroyed this movie. Why did the Indiana Jones series work? I think maybe because the stories were based on religious lore, i.e., the power of the Ark, the belief in the Holy Grail, and the stories of not so much the Shankara stones, but more in the black magic going on behind the scenes. "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" gave us a story that was just too out there to even try to believe it for one minute. Although, now that I think about it, maybe that’s why I did like the movie – the plot was so dumb I didn’t dwell on it and just enjoyed the kick-ass action. I’m so confused.

In the end "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" will give you what you can expect. Let’s tally some stars. It’s two stars for the cool action, two stars for Jolie playing Lara Croft and even almost bearing her breasts, one star for some pretty cool set designs, but I’ve got to knock off 1 ½ stars for that dumb-ass story. That leaves things at 3 ½ stars out of 5 for "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider."

That’s it for this one! I’m The Dude on the Right!! L8R!!!