6 out of 10
 

Based on the popular video game of the same title, this film follows the exploits of Laura Croft, an attractive and apparently very wealthy young woman played by Angelina Joli, as she searches for an ancient artifact which is supposed to allow the person who has it the power to manipulate the fabric of time however he or she chooses. Her adventure begins when she is woken in the middle of the night by a clock in the back of a closet on the other side of her enormous mansion that suddenly starts ticking. I guess she's a very light sleeper. After some investigation, Laura learns of someone else who is also searching for the artifact: an ancient and mysterious, group known as the Illuminati, who are bent on controlling the world. And so, of course, Laura must step in to save the world. Along the way, she will deal with various villains, and learn a disturbing truth about her father, who disappeared many years ago. To make things more challenging, the artifact was divided into three pieces, each hidden in a different remote part of the world, and each is only accessible for a few minutes during a certain stage of a rare planetary alignment that only happens once every few thousand years. And the clock Laura found is a virtual necessity for finding the pieces. So, the big question is why Laura goes looking for the pieces in the first place? She could just sit back and do nothing and wait for the alignment to end, and still have foiled the Illuminati's plans, since the people they send after the pieces could never find them on their own.

Essentially, the entire premise of the movie makes no sense. That said, if all you're looking for is an action flick, and you don't really plan on paying too much attention to the plot anyway, you might like this one. There's plenty of action and some good fight scenes, and a couple of really bizarre sets. My personal favorite has to be the giant mechanical model of the solar system which Laura and a couple of the bad guy's goons have to climb through towards the end of the film in order to get a hold of the last piece of the artifact. I have no idea why anyone would want to build such a thing, other than as a film set, but it looks pretty cool all the same. In the end, Laura gets the artifact, has a brief reunion with her father in the past, sets a few things right in the present, and destroys the artifact permanently so that it will never bother humanity again. Like there were ever any doubts that she would succeed. If you want a deep, or even logical movie, you're definatly looking in the wrong place, but if you just want a fun action flick this one might be for you.