Lara Croft wallows in wildest exaggeration

In theaters

LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER. Directed by Simon West, written by West, Patrick Massett and John Zinman. 96 minutes. PG-13.

Last fall, when Paramount Pictures began touting the new Simon West movie, “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” an action-adventure film based on the hugely popular video game series, there was no question that its controversial star, Angelina Jolie, was perfect for the role. Both women are talented, beautiful, gross exaggerations.

In the video games, everything about Lara Croft is bigger than life – the foes she fights, the stunts she performs, the guns she wields, the venues she visits and especially her breasts, which are so wildly out of proportion to the rest of her body, they were instrumental in making Lara Croft the world’s first cyberpinup girl.

Jolie, the Academy Award-winning actress whose marriage to Billy Bob Thornton has given new meaning to the word “spectacle,” is an exaggeration of a different sort. Whether she’s accused of breaking up relationships, admitting in the current issue of Rolling Stone that she’d like to drink her husband’s blood before biting holes in his body and then devouring him, or busy denying an incestuous relationship with her brother, nothing about her seems real.

With her angular features, large eyes and impossibly full lips, she doesn’t even look real – although she does look a lot like the cartoonish Lara Croft, which brings us back to “Tomb Raider’s” one true stroke of genius: its casting.

Too bad the rest of the film is such an uninspired wreck. In spite of Jolie giving her all as Croft – the actress has a terrific sense of irony and does most of her own stunt work, which is impressive considering the complexity of the stunts – the soulless mess of a script consistently lets her down, as does Simon West’s hackneyed direction.

In its most streamlined form, the complex plot whips around Lara, a super-rich, post-feminist English babe who, as a child, tossed aside her teacups and silver spoons for a life of globetrotting adventure. Think of her as a female Indiana Jones, but with a body that could blow holes through James Bond’s icy veneer.

Using her extravagant mansion as a training ground, Lara eventually comes in contact with a group of men, archly called the Illuminati, who want ownership of a time-travel device that only works when the planets align every 5,000 years. For Lara, having the power is clear – she’ll be able to bring back her dead father (John Voight, Jolie’s real father) and finally have a life with him.

For the men working against her, well, as is so often the case in these sorts of movies, somebody will become God and control the world after making a connection, this time with something called the Triangle of Light.

Sound fun? It isn’t. The problem with “Tomb Raider” isn’t just its cut-and-paste cliches, its plodding story or its badly conceived action sequences, but that Lara Croft is too invincible for her own good. Since she’s never given a vulnerable moment, it’s difficult to believe she’s ever really in peril. Indeed, all the world can blow up around Lara Croft – and it does here – but who cares when there’s no reason to fear for her life?

Grade: D+

On video and DVD

PROOF OF LIFE. Directed by Taylor Hackford. Written by Tony Gilroy. 135 minutes. R.

After all the rumors and speculation, the nasty tabloid headlines and the failed marriage of its star, Meg Ryan, to her longtime husband, Dennis Quaid, it comes down to this for Taylor Hackford’s “Proof of Life”: The rumors that once swirled around Ryan’s alleged relationship with her co-star, Russell Crowe, prove more interesting than the muddled movie they left in their wake.

Shot on location in South America, Chechnya and England, “Proof of Life” stars Crowe as Terry Thorne, a former SAS commando who now makes his living as a hostage negotiator. He leads a busy life, one that ultimately takes him to the mountains of South America, where this film tries to find a heartbeat in the kidnapping of Peter Bowman (David Morse), an American engineer being held by guerrillas for $3 million.

Hired by Bowman’s wife, Alice, Thorne leads the long and grueling negotiations to get Peter home safe. The emphasis here is on long and grueling – not just for Alice, Terry and Peter, but for audiences, who must slog through it with them.

What surprises in “Proof of Life” isn’t just its overall mediocrity, but that Ryan and Crowe have zero chemistry together on screen. There isn’t one spark between them – not one – which robs the film of the soul it needed to lift it out of tedium.

Still, there are standouts. Morse’s excellent performance steals the movie away from its overhyped stars, and David Caruso as a hostage negotiator does his best work since “NYPD Blue.” His scenes with Crowe are sometimes so intense, one almost wishes this movie had been about them.

Grade: C-