Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life
DVD Release

I liked the first film. In the midst of the loud music and loud bangs and jiggling chest there was a story that had a certain heart to it. There. I said it. Now we can move on. I can't say I liked this one, though. Despite the ostensibly better hands this film was put in, this one is a soul-less piece of cookie-cutter action film that totally misses the very things that give this set of characters and stories their appeal.

The soundtrack has been weirdly muted. The thrashing techno of the first film has been replaced with a few Korn riffs here and there and a bunch of distressingly typical score-fodder. Even the closing credits number is an alternative piece that could play on any top-40 station without wrinkling the brows of any of the little teenie-bopper paper dolls who listen to it. The impact of that that edgy, mindlessly loud soundtrack from the first film is gone.

The action isn't so easy, or so graceful. She's still mouthing all those insouciant quips, but there's real effort on her face when she's doing all that breaking-and-entering. That was kind of nice. It lends a certain touch of realism to the shark-punching and other improbable hyjinks.

On the bad side, they leeched all the emotion out of the rest of the characters. Taking yourself too seriously in this genre makes for deadly dull cinema and this one went over like a lead balloon. The funny by-play is gone. Bryce and Hillary have suddenly become the straightest of straight-men, but there's no funny guy to lead them. We get that one scene with her and Hillary bashing at each other to opera does bring out a certain hint of their relationship from the last film, but it's quickly squelched. The Spongebob Squarepants in Chinese clip was the only real light moment in the film.

These things are a lot about pure sex. I'd have to have had my head in the sand pretty hard to miss that in the whole genre, not just these films. Otherwise she would look a hell of a lot more like Velma than Daphne. But this one felt crass, almost cheap. The scene on the horse in the sidesaddle is a juxtaposition of submission and aggression that would make the Marquis de Sade shake his head. It carries right into the underplay between her and Terry with both of them riding 350 cc's of foreplay through the Chinese countryside. Their telling who got the bottom bunk by whose guns were under the pillow was original, I have to give them that. I think they meant for it to show that they were made for each other, but actually it just underscored the essential hopelessness of any sort of relationship between the two of them. Her reloading her clips while wrapped in a sheet was also a transparent attempt to make a profoundly stern activity seem sexy. So transparent that it flat doesn't work, even with them going at it like that afterwards.

Her erstwhile lover, Terry Sheridan, is a played by a criminally under-cast Gerard Butler. Somehow, we're supposed to believe that this wiry little punk not only was once the statuesque Lara's lover, but that she would ever again have a damned thing to do with a man who did what the movie says he did to her. For all her strength and smarts, somehow she's supposed to take his adolescent jerk lines and fall for him again. And then, just to make sure to completely kill any vestige of human feeling in the whole thing, they make her shoot him. I was in tears, but they were tears of rage at the scriptwriter.

There are some plot holes you can drive a truck through, and some unfortunate scenes. I'm real curious how in the hell that particular set of tones could have been generated in the ancient world, especially within a tolerance so close that sending it over that incredibly sexy cellphone distorts it too much for it to work. Once it's solved, the map is cool and all, but the way they have her dressed and the way the map projects it looks a whole lot more like a China Airways ad. Oh, and shooting monitors doesn't stop computers. Ever.

The ending was a mystery. The weird Escherian caves that have strange gravitational effects that no one ever noticed during the various scientific surveys strains my believer-attachment to the breaking point. Same with Black Mercurial Gook that Eats You, version 2.0. Reiss's death is horrific, but pretty much in the usual vein. This is all pretty standard fare for these films and while it was annoying didn't raise a brow. But making her shoot that guy was just about the most pointless thing I've seen in recent cinema. It was almost like some sort of kharmic retribution against Lara. All in all this film was a trainwreck of improbably bad crap but that was definately the caboose.

If I felt the need to watch an improbably well-built young lady run all over the world and kick butt, I'd watch the first version of this. But definately not this one.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
Theatrical Release
I posted this review on Gamerdad back in December. In honor of the rumors that the Region 1 DVD release is March 16th, here's the theatrical review.

This year's rash of seaborne epics brings us another good round of swashing and buckling, but from a darker and more intense side. For just over two hours, you are taken back to the claustrophobic feel and drunken heave of life aboard a three-masted, sixth-rate frigate in the strait-laced British Navy.

Lucky Jack Aubrey is one of the most interesting heroes crafted out of that time. Horatio Hornblower worked his way up the ranks and never looked back. He was bold, daring, and brilliant, but never less than a gentleman. He does not have the conflicting currents that Jack has. Aubrey never really sheds all his roots, and the way he has to straddle both worlds provided opportunity for some thinking and events that would never happen in Hornblower's stiff-starched circles.

I had a hard time imagining who could possibly do the part justice. To be honest, Russell Crowe wasn't even on my personal cast list (I was thinking more along the lines of Rufus Sewell). But Weir saw something I missed. Getting a guy who looks in charge wearing what looks like a nightgown is not all that hard. For the purposes of this story, you needed to get someone who looks like he could hold his own in a bare-knuckles bar fight but still looks like he belongs in that frilly collar. That fine line between gentility and mayhem is a hard one to walk. Crowe doesn't just walk it, he strides it with a spring in his step and a predatory gleam in his eye. And it's not just the shirt and the other trappings.

Bettany's Maturin was as true to the book as I could have hoped for. His previous association with Crowe in "A Beautiful Mind" helped us believe in their friendship from the get-go. His screen-time as a doctor was well done. He handles the wrist-deep gore with a certain feeling of a boy taking something apart to see what makes it tick and the screams of pain with the look of a man in his own personal definition of Hell. His fascination with the natural world plays a great counterpoint to the mono-focus of Aubrey. Having them play together was a great hold-over from the book I was afraid they were going to kill. In the book they actually meet at a concert when Jack's penchant for conducting any music he's listening to annoys the living daylights out of Maturin and they have words about it.

The production designer and everyone who had anything at all to do with the designs of the H.M.S. Surprise and La Acheron needs some sort of special award. The ships are frighteningly real. The Acheron is played by a digital replica of the U.S.S. Constitution for long shots. I don't know what they did for close in but you know damned skippy they weren't blowing holes in the real ship - she's not called "Old Ironsides" for nothing and I'm sure the Navy would have had something to say about that. She's still commissioned in the U.S. Navy, and even though she's 206 years old she still can sail under her own power. The Surprise is played by the HMS Rose, a full-rigged replica of an 18th Century British Frigate that was a training school ship working out of Rhode Island until Fox bought her for the film.

Despite the fact that they were written starting in 1970, you would think these novels came straight out of the nineteenth century. Anyone who struggled through those chapters about whaling in Mellville's "Moby Dick" know just what I mean. O'Brian fills the pages with detail on every single aspect of life at sea; those parts about knots nearly did me in. As annoying as it can be, that detail is an important part of the story and you had to have it somehow. Had it not been there this film would have been an empty bit of wet bang-and-flash, a bad action flick in a cocked hat. Instead of explaining it, they lived it and helped us see it by the context of their using it. The design team's attention to all the detail kept it from having to bog down the narrative and pull it down into the doldrums.

The dialog doesn't come completely clear in the wash and spray. They're all still sailors, and he's still Captain. It is handled well, though. If you don't know what you're listening to the film still works, it just doesn't make quite as much perfect sense. Jack just keeps shouting some very abstruse stuff at the crew, and then they start doing things to stuff and the ship moves. You can get through the film on that level with no problem and without missing a beat. They go as light as they could and still have it sound right. For those of us who have our sea legs, language-wise, it is a treasure trove.

And they didn't whitewash the tradition of bringing boys as young as ten into the Navy. If they were of any sort of noble rank they often went straight into officer training and into combat with the rank of midshipman. Young Lord Blakeney (played by newcomer Max Pirkis) was the wonderful yet frightening example. Yes, he really was in charge of a gunnery crew at 13, and he really was left in command of the Surprise when her senior officers boarded the Acheron. And Mr. Calamy's promotion to 3rd Lieutenant so he could command a boarding party was not just a fluke, but standard practice of the time. He had to be named an officer or the crew would not have legally been taking his orders. And the sad tradition of commissioning a cadet who lost his life in the course of his duty was as faithfully performed as sewing him into his hammock for burial.

And there were no surprise women hiding out in the ranks or miraculously pulled into this story for which I breathed a heart-felt sigh of relief. I hate having stories torn out of shape to somehow make them conform to our sensibilities. As much as we would like to forget those corset-bound times, they were real. It isn't brought out well in the movie, but Jack is married, and so is Maturin. If they'd been off running as Playboy of the World I would have been highly annoyed. Besides, watching this film gave you a visceral feel for just how small and crowded those ships really were. Could you imagine trying to find anything like privacy in there, or any way to deal with the trappings of being female at the time?

The rest of the crew was well played and for the most part by people who actually know how to crew the ship so it came across as very real, even to that gang holystoning the decks. Most of the guys with names are big on British TV, but not so much over here. Mr. Hollum you might recognize as Gustav from "Ever After". Billy Boyd is rather noticeable to the Tolkeinati as Mr. Bonden, the coxswain, but he does a workman-like job of not being Pippin here. Robert Pugh, who plays the sailing master, has a list of UK credits as long as your arm.

The score is properly fitted to the movie. The classic pieces the two leads play are backed up by an unobtrusive orchestration that underscores the action but doesn't overshadow the classics blended in with it, and doesn't overpower the essentially quiet nature of wind-powered sea travel. There are no engines or other hums to have to shout over, and they use periods of actual quiet to bring that out.

Master and Commander is first in a series of 20 books, so there's a whole lot more material to go. This one brings us but a taste of what I hope is to be a long and glorious cinematic friendship.

Kid Factor: The realism that makes this movie such a treasure for grown-ups makes it a minefield for children. Yes, there is nothing more than an inviting glance, sex-wise, and little or no swearing (at least little that we would recognize as such). That said, the battle sequences are very intense and there seems to be a whole heck of a lot of blood and dead bodies for the rating.

The biggest thing you're going to have to talk to even older children about is the "midshipman" that are on the crew. They have 13 year old officers. This is historically accurate but usually glossed over by using young, but not that young actors in those parts. We have the cherubic Max Parkis playing Lord Blakeney, leading a gunnery team and leading his men into combat and having an arm amputated (though thank goodness they don't make you actually see it). Back then, he could concievably have been married. Here and now, he'd be in 7th grade. It's the start of a LONG conversation, particularly if you have boys of that age.

The language is going to be a barrier as well. For example, a sixth-rate frigate has nothing to do with it's quality - it's a meaurement. It's the smallest sort of ship they included in the frigate class. The Acheron, on the other hand, is one of the largest. And that's just the beginning. In the film they only explain ONE sea-term. The rest is left to context to let you understand. With kids, it's going to be a constant stream of "What did that mean?" and "What's that thing?" Unless you've boned up on your Forester I'd think twice.

I also don't think they're going to like it much as a film. A stern chase means days of creeping up at each other with what looks like no purpose at all - there's not even scenery to let you know you're getting somewhere. They do attempt to let you feel those parts of the tactics of ship battles as well as the frenetic blowing-holes-in-things part. I would imagine if your kids liked The Hulk, they'll probably do all right with the pace. If they can't get through that without fidgeting, I'd wait for DVD.

MPAA Rating: Rated PG-13 for intense battle sequences, related images, and brief language.