'Indiana Jones' would be mad

Before a prospective viewer of "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" plunks down a fistful of cash, he should keep a few things in mind.\nFirst, as a general rule, the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to the number of screenwriters involved in its production.\nWith a single screenwriter, a film generally possesses a sharply defined artistic vision. With two or three, one can assume it was necessary to call in a few veterans to polish rough edges or sharpen the dialogue.\nReportedly, 11 screenwriters toyed with "Tomb Raider," which is why it's a muddled mess of a popcorn flick. It takes its inspiration from a buxom and wildly popular video game character, which is kind of like basing a play on skee ball.\nWatching someone play a video game isn't fun -- the entertainment comes with the challenge. And video games lack the fundamental elements of a decent movie, such as fleshed-out characters, a plot and, well, logic.\nThis is a movie in which two characters -- not one, but two -- get along just fine after taking a knife to the heart. It's a movie in which the curvaceous heroine ventures out into Siberia with nothing more than a sleeveless, form-fitting top. This is a movie in which it's possible to outrun bullets and fend off several dozen commandoes armed with laser-guided submachine guns with nothing more than a pocketknife.\nThe opening scene best captures "Tomb Raider," which stars Angelina Jolie's bee-stung lips and heavily padded mammary glands more than it does the actress herself. She's doing battle with a giant robotic spider, emptying more magazine cartridges than a panicked 18-year-old American soldier in the jungles of Vietnam.\nThe cinematography is frenetic, and the frames are so tight that it's impossible to have any sense of physical space or any idea as to exactly what's going on. She vanquishes the beast of a machine -- only to see it rise from the grave and sneak up on her in an inspired stroke of creativity.\nOf course, she easily dispatches it again shortly thereafter. Jolie, playing a wealthy globe-trotting British archeologist, then nears the relic that she's presumably seeking. But gasp! — it's another false denouement.\n(Incidentally, archaeology -- which I always assumed was a rather staid vocation -- seems to involve a lot of gunplay, knife-slinging and kickboxing.)\nThis time, the robot has her pinned. It looks like the end -- a mere four minutes or so into the movie. She simply orders it to stop and then pops in a CD: "Lara's Party Mix." It turns out that the whole extended display of special effects was nothing more than a training exercise.\nWhile she's toweling off, her nerdy tech assistant (a slumming Noah Taylor, whose past credits include "Shine") whines over the fact that she used live ammo on his beloved creation.\n"Did you program it to stop before it tore my head off?" she insouciantly asks in the passable British accent she musters throughout the film.\nThat's not only a really lame retort unworthy of a well-heeled Englishwoman who speaks dozens of languages and listens to Bach -- it makes no sense whatsoever. She just told it to stop a bloody minute ago.\n"Tomb Raider" -- directed by Simon West of "Con Air" fame -- is riddled with such mind-blowing lapses of detail.\nThe thin pretext of a plot involves a secret society called the Illuminati that wants to retrieve two sides of an ancient triangle while the planets are aligned in some fashion. If they succeed in their mission, they'll be able to control time and thus the universe.\nJolie manages to snag half of the triangle in an ancient Cambodian temple about 50 minutes into the film, meaning there's no real reason for the movie to go on. She would only have to destroy one side of the triangle to foil the Illuminati's fiendish scheme of world domination. But not a single character notices.\nOf course, the plot doesn't really matter -- it's only a clothesline on which to hang the action sequences. One -- involving a giant seven-armed stone Buddha coming to life -- passes as mildly entertaining.\nUnfortunately, the rest of the film is cliched and derivative, ripping off "Indiana Jones" and "Batman." In one scene, she even evades a gun-toting pursuer by leaping off a waterfall.\nOne has to wonder if Harrison Ford will receive royalties.