Two thousand one was a strange time for the blockbuster. The first Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings movies heralded a boom in large-scale fantasy. Spider-Man, which kicked off our modern superhero era, was still a year away. And most of the year’s biggest action hits—which included The Mummy Returns, Rush Hour 2, and Jurassic Park III—were sequels to franchises that were already on the decline.
Into that mix came the year’s biggest movie starring a woman: Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, with Angelina Jolie in the title role. Arriving near the peak popularity of the video-game series on which it’s based, Tomb Raider grossed hundreds of millions of dollars, and almost instantly became Jolie’s highest-grossing movie to date.
So, 16 years later: Does it hold up? Viewed today, Tomb Raider feels, fittingly enough, like a relic of its era. It begins with Lara rejecting the opportunity to go raid some tombs. When her butler suggests some possible missions, she turns each location down. ("Egypt is nothing but pyramids and sand," sulks Lara. Spoken like a true archaeologist!) Instead, Lara lounges around her palatial mansion, fighting training robots, doing bungee-yoga, and taking long, painstakingly shot showers.
Of course, Lara eventually gets dragged into the field, solving puzzles and dual-wielding pistols and yes, raiding tombs. The plot of Tomb Raider is a semi-comprehensible mishmash of excuses for action scenes set to techno music; I watched it last night, and I’m already kind of fuzzy on the details. Lara Croft spends most of the movie chasing "The Triangle of Light"—an artifact that has, rather confusingly, been broken into two pieces, not three. Her rival for the Triangle is the hilariously named Illuminati agent Manfred Powell (Iain Glen, who parlayed his Tomb Raider credentials into a recurring role in the Resident Evil movies before popping up as Game of Thrones’ Ser Jorah Mormont). The Triangle of Light allows its wielder to mess with the flow of time. Manfred wants to use the Triangle to take over the world or whatever; Lara wants to use it to go back in time and save her dad’s life.
Here’s something weird you might have forgotten: Daniel Craig is in this movie! Five years before taking over the role of James Bond in Casino Royale, Craig appears here as Alex West, a rival tomb raider—and an American!—who works with Manfred until he inevitably switches to Lara’s side. I guess Alex West is supposed to be Lara’s love interest, but the chemistry between Jolie and Craig is so anemic that their banter—which is clearly supposed to be in the sexy Romancing the Stone vein—just comes off as two bitter people who hate each other. (That said, Tomb Raider does give us the fascinating spectacle of Angelina Jolie’s bad British accent versus Daniel Craig’s bad American accent.)
If there’s any emotional core to Tomb Raider, it’s in Lara’s grief over the death of her father, Lord Richard Croft. You’d think casting Jon Voight—Angelina Jolie’s actual, real-life father—as Richard Croft might have added some extra resonance to this subplot. But Tomb Raider presupposes the audience’s investment in Richard Croft without even attempting to make him an actual character.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter, because Lara herself is less a character than an avatar: swinging around her mansion on bungee cords and punching bad guys, fighting a killer robot to the tune of cassette tape called LARA’S PARTY MIX, and beating up stone statues that come to life without ever seeming even a little surprised that, you know, a bunch of stone statues have just come to life. Tomb Raider basically doesn’t give Lara an arc. She arrives in the first scene fully formed, as a sexy, acrobatic, pistol-wielding badass, and she ends the movie more or less the same.
Angelina Jolie glides by on charisma alone, winking and raising her eyebrows through pretty much every cool action scene—but it’s safe to say Tomb Raider isn’t really the best use of her talents as an actress. Apart from some pretty good stunt work and a basic physical resemblance, there’s just not a lot of skill required to dig into this version of Lara Croft—a problem reflected in the ludicrous questions Jolie faced on the promotional trail leading up to Tomb Raider’s release. In one interview, Jolie was actually asked about whether her breasts were big enough to play Lara Croft, and her answer… well, it’s certainly a snapshot of the dumb shit actresses were forced to contend with in 2001:
"C’mon, I'm not so flat-chested to begin with. When I wear a tight T-shirt, I look a certain way. So it wasn't like we had to completely change me. You know, we just had to enhance me a little. I'm a 36C. Lara, she's a 36D. And in the game, she's a double D, so we took her down some. But we did give her a bit of padding there. For me, it was simply one size. So it was like having a padded bra. But no, I am not flat chested anyway. […] But we did want to put in something for those hardcore game fans. Lara has those big breasts in the game. We didn't want to make them as big as in the game, but at the same time we didn't want to take away from her the things that are, you know, her trademarks."
Her trademarks. It’s not for nothing that Lara Croft is a polarizing figure in the annals of video game history—simultaneously one of the first female leads of her own action-adventure franchise, and an openly sexualized figure with proportions so absurd that Angelina Jolie was deemed insufficiently buxom to play her without a little extra padding.
But just as it’s difficult to fully dismiss the original Tomb Raider games because they were a breakthrough for representation in triple-A video games, it’s difficult to dismiss the movie for being the rare female-led action blockbuster. In the early 2000s, it was rare to see a blockbuster with a female lead, and Tomb Raider’s success as a kind of female Indiana Jones is the kind of thing that laid groundwork for the later, better female-led action movies Hollywood would eventually produce. Before the decade was over, Angelina Jolie would even get another crack at making a solid action movie with Salt.
If Tomb Raider hasn’t aged particularly well, it still holds a special place in the pantheon of video game movies—which is a little like being the most distinguished pile of garbage, but still. More than 16 years after its release, Tomb Raider remains the highest-grossing video game adaptation in history, topping more recent efforts like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Assassin’s Creed, and every single Resident Evil movie. The same can’t be said of its sequel, Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, which came just two years later but grossed far less than the original. Despite those diminishing returns, producers made it clear they still planned to produce a third Tomb Raider movie—but when Angelina Jolie announced she wouldn’t be reprising the role of Lara in any subsequent sequels, the Tomb Raider movie franchise was put on ice.
Until now, of course. The new Tomb Raider movie, which comes out on Friday, is based on the excellent 2013 video game reboot, which reimagines Lara as a rookie archaeologist who spends most of the narrative just scrabbling to survive. It’s a richer take on the character than the superheroic cipher played by Jolie, and Alicia Vikander—now the second Oscar winner to play Lara Croft—is a promising choice to guide the franchise into a future with a little more substance to it.
Does it hold up?
Nah. But the bizarre music video for U2’s "Elevation (Tomb Raider Mix)" is definitely worth four minutes of your time: