Angelina Jolie Movie:

		List Price: $19.99		Label: Paramount Salesrank: 68145 Released: October 4, 2005
		Our Price: $7.82
		Used Price: $7.10
		MPAA Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested) Media: UMD for PSP

Editorial Review:
Archaeologist and explorer extrodinaire Lara Croft journeys to a temple sunken underwater that leads to a sphere that contains the mythical Pandora's Box, only to have it stolen from her by Chen Lo, the leader of a Chinese crime syndicate, who's in league with a villian named Reiss who wants to use the Box as a doomsday weapon. Facing her greatest challenges yet, the intrepid tomb raider pursues Lo, in order to get her hands back on Pandora's Box, and fulfill the desire of the Queen.

Description of Lara Croft Tomb Raider [UMD for PSP]:
Like the video game series it's based on, Tomb Raider is best enjoyed for its physical strategies, since even casual scrutiny of story details will induce a headache. It's more concerned with puzzles than plot, populated with characters that don't have personalities so much as attitudes. It's silly and somber at the same time, but as a franchise vehicle for Angelina Jolie in the title role of relic hunter Lara Croft, this is packaged entertainment at its most agreeable, ambitious in scope and scale, and filled with the kind of globetrotting adventure that could make Jolie the best thing that's happened to action movies since Indiana Jones. Could being the operative word here, because Tomb Raider can't match any of Steven Spielberg's celebrated joyrides, but the ingredients are there for an exquisitely cinematic meal.

Perhaps to distance himself from Lara Croft's video game origins, director Simon West takes things a bit too seriously; Tomb Raider handles its plot (involving a planetary alignment, the nefarious Illuminati, and coveted relics that hold the key to controlling the flow of time) with all the gravity of a championship chess match... minus the tension. If the movie had lightened up and been truly suspenseful (instead of being suffused with been-there, done-that familiarity), it would have been an instant popcorn classic. As it is, however, this is an elegantly mounted adventure featuring exotic locations (in Cambodia and Iceland) and an exotic star born for her role. Even without her padded bra, Jolie would be the living embodiment of Lara Croft, and that's enough to bode well for inevitable sequels. --Jeff Shannon

Lara Croft Tomb Raider [UMD for PSP] Reviews:
"I Woke Up This Morning And Just Hated Everything" ~ A Pleasurable Torment Indeed
2008-06-16 - In '01 the immensely popular video game featuring the voluptuous, computer generated Lara Croft was transformed into a major Hollywood film starring the extremely sexy Angelina Jolie, The film `Lara Croft - Tomb Raider' is a slick, tongue-in-cheek action/adventure ala Indiana Jones that succeeds in entertaining its audience with exotic locations, superior special effects, numerous action sequences and the lovely Angelina Jolie to keep the viewer focused. The dialogue is also well thought out containing lots of memorable little quips one can store away for personal use at a later date.

Lots of fun provided for a high energy evening so fasten your seat belts!

It's boring.
2008-06-09 - The film is boring. There's not exciment and no suspense. The plot is like that of a video game. I mean there's nothing original. The worst thing is the special effects. In many scenes, I can see clearly that the settings are fake.

Blu-ray version of Lara Croft Tomb Raider movie
2008-05-23 - I give the movie 5 stars as an exciting imaginitive adventure movie.
But there are issues with the Blu-ray version - which are:
The movie was not photographically focused with HD video in mind. Sometimes the details are clearly in focus, sometimes the details are only DVD clear. This is better than an ordinary DVD "upconverted" but is not consistently what I would expect from a true Blu-ray quality movie. If you already own the DVD it may not be worth upgrading - but if you don't I think it is worth it for adventure movie fans.

This is based on the original Blu-ray disk release.

Lara Croft has been Screwed
2008-04-20 - I've been with Lara Croft since the first Tomb Raider game--the version for Sony Playstation--and I can tell you this is not only a great way to screw up a perfectly good setting and a perfectly good story, but also a great way to screw up a main character. Sure, I believe in evolution; by the time this movie began production, Lara Croft had been the protagonist of every game in the Playstation series FIVE times at this point.

First off, the first game was the only one with this combination: an interesting character, a good plot, interesting dialogue, an interesting script, a music score that works, an interesting setting albeit a not-so-action-oriented one but nonetheless immersive and captivating, mostly non-fictional-type enemies (like birds, bats, tigers, you know, animals of the forest, and a few humans too), a "free-roaming" three-dimensional world, and even good voice acting. This combination was a real development for videogames because, before the first game released in 1996--1995 on another system--not many of these things happened. But, the quality of all of these thing noted here had changed in the sequel games. Some things had just-as-good quality and some things were not just-as-good, depending on the sequel. As a series, the first game was really a push for Lara as a character. It is essential to carry the traits of that character forward into the sequels. But, after five games on the Playstation, if anyone's going to make a movie and call it "Tomb Raider," if anyone's going to depict the titanic "Lara Croft," one must be faithful, regardless of whether or not its writers decide to include the transformations in the sequel games or not--it doesn't matter.

At the heart of things, Lara Croft is the daughter of an English aristocrat. I can't tell you why anyone would ever think that Angelina Jolie, as likable and sexy as she is, would fit this character. Does Jolie even attempt to put on an English accent? No. So then, I guess none of the storylined traits exist, and this film is solely about selling tickets and purifying the entire visual scenery when, in the game, this is not the purified thing. And, in the game, it is Lara who appears sanitary only to prove otherwise, and that this is an important function of the character. In this film, the character Lara Croft may as well have been the daughter of a New York City crack addict, because there is no sharing resemblance to the original game's ideas.

The Tomb Raider game was a genre piece. It was only like the first ten minutes of the first film in the Indiana Jones series--or the protagonist of the old Atari, Activision game Pitfall--but it was more particularly supposed to be like, in plot, a marginally science fiction piece similar to the first ten minutes of The Fifth Element or the last hour-and-a-half of Stargate. The plot of the first game was about a rugged and youthful daughter of a wealthy aristocrat who did not share in the interests of dirty corporate politics, and so her character juxtaposes them. The story did not have Lara hating aristocratic wealth, but rather accepting it because she had been born into it, but with an appetite for adventure and the means to get there, financially, physically, and intellectually. She's the kind of girl who must rather have been an Oxford University student of archeology than a politician like her parents--or whatever they did to make money, probably inheriting it and some titles from the English monarchy as well. It just doesn't make sense to dispose of this past! It's in Lara's genetic makeup. One can't just remove these things and make a good movie starring Lara Croft; it's more than that.

Also is the problem of just plain bad decisions all around about the sanitized visuals and sanitized plot. This film is just an action piece with dopey characters that Lara must avoid. This isn't what Lara started out doing! There were dopey characters, but Lara used to be an educated young woman. In this film, she is just a female Rambo who likes caves. There's no excuse for what she does in this film. It's just stupidity. Too much has been changed and, cinematically, the movie itself is either boring or has too many flaws. It possesses very little of the originality in the first game, a coherent plot involving something better than a bunch of stupid moron-minded humans with the animals of the forest missing, all because Lara's gone and changed into James Bond now. This film is a stupid action piece without a shred of credibility or intrigue, two things that abundantly made the first game so memorable.

tomb raider
2008-02-27 - the movie is a new classic. it has all the eliments of a great blockbuster. action, guns, tech gadgets. and a good and evilcombined and a map to a treasure at the end of the movie. it's 007 mixed with indiana jones, but one obvious thing a tough aluring lara croft as the main character... a must for the blu-ray collection!!!!!