2003-10-25 - 10:37 a.m.
Last night Gandalf and I visited the cheap-rate low-rent second-run theatre for some mindless movie-viewing before the pubs, and unwittingly performed a sort of public service by spending far too much money ($3.00) on Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life so that somewhere in this city there were two folks who didn't have to buy tickets to this "film" and were thus spared. It is awful. Do not view this "movie." I urge you to allocate those two hours elsewhere, to some much more important activity -- may I suggest lounging in a slightly uncomfortable chair in the dark, staring blankly straight ahead while chewing on a wad of aluminum foil?She punches a shark. And she does this near the beginning, when the film is still faced with the Herculean undertaking of convincing us that this is not mere shlock. Deep underwater and running out of breath, Lara Croft decides the fastest, not to say most Croftian method of getting to the surface quickly is to cut her arm to attract a shark, punch it, then hop on its back and ride to the surface. This should be enough, I think -- you shouldn't even need to go to the trouble of writing about the movie. Reviewers should simply write "She punches a goddamn shark -- 0.01 out of 5 stars." Or, "She pole-vaults onto a helicopter -- no stars." Or, "the artifact she's pursuing is Pandora's friggin' box -- antistars shall be deducted from Jan de Bont's future films."
Of course, we expected bad -- part of the charm of the first Tomb Raider movie was that it was willing to flirt with extreme film bad, to stray no further into seriousness than a movie based on a video game deserves to go, and to make sure an air of isn't-this-silly playfulness was always in evidence. The Cradle of Life tosses itself clumsily headlong into bad, pole-vaulting into the $0.99 clearance bin where it can trade "film secrets" with a beaten-up DVD copy of Cube 2: Hypercube.
Thankfully we still had the pub.
UPDATE: Because I've actually received more than one email from conscientious friends of mine advising me that I have erred and that punching a shark in the nose is actually an excellent idea and will help save your life in a shark attack, I suppose it's time to update this entry with the following:
1. Punching a shark in the nose is usually recommended not because we're capable of harming a shark there (we aren't) but because it's said that doing so disorients the animal, who hunts blind using a kind of sonar / electromagnetic-field-perception / voodoo sense. This is why it's recommended, but...
2. It's not actually true. Attacking a shark's nose does no good -- survival-guides suggest going for the eyes (best) or gills (a close second) because these are the places on the shark's body where measly humans can actually cause it a great deal of pain.
Read this, ye still inconvinced: Worst-Case Scenarios: How to Fend Off a Shark
You may also notice in your perusal of the above that nowhere is it recommended that you cut yourself to attract sharks, or that you should even think of them as a mode of quick transportation from hundreds of feet below the sea when in a bit of an 02 pinch... The most amusing thing about Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life in my opinion is the fact that since she pulls this shark-punching stunt within ten minutes of the beginning, the film would have been less than ten minutes long if strictly realistic -- Lara either devoured at once by a pissed-off and decidedly un-stunned shark, or, if by some miracle the ride-the-shark trick worked and it went straight to the surface, winding up with a wicked, wicked case of the bends. Go Lara!
