Hey folks, Harry here... Gotta wake up tomorrow and see ATLANTIS bright and early... I haven't seen it yet, but I can tell you that TOMB RAIDER sucks the short hairs clean off.... Here's our filthy seaman with the inside skinny on both....
Ahoy there, squirts. 'Tis I, the swashbuckling crusty seaman, Quint, here to give you fine folks a little peek into the two Adventure films opening this weekend, Atlantis and Tomb Raider. I'll give you a hint of what's to come... one of them sucks and the other doesn't.
Honestly, if you were to tell me last month that Disney's adventure movie would be more enjoyable and have better action than the live action, PG-13 Tomb Raider, I would have checked both of my legs to see which one was being pulled. Honestly, as much as I've enjoyed some of Disney's newer stuff like Tarzan and even Mulan, most recent Disney films have been predictably by the numbers Disney. Atlantis, while not the best Disney movie ever, has the balls enough to actually break the Disney formula. No songs, no speaking animals, a story that's character driven and not shoved down your throat.
The movie is paced terrifically. There was never a spot where I was looking around at the audience or checking my watch. The comedy was funny, but very rarely out of place. The characters were interesting and fun. I love that they got Don Novello to be one of the voices. Father Guido Sarducci himself. His voice is amazing and fits his character perfectly. Jim Varney's last outing as Cookie is also well done, if a little sad that it was only a small character.
Now, there are some characters that are out and out Disney, like the James Garner voiced Commander Lyle T. Rourke or the Corey Burton voiced The Mole. You see those characters and see them interact and you know you're watching Disney. Especially in the case of The Mole. He's basically the big comedic character. The filthy digger who has an obsession with dirt and an aversion to soap. He's a typical Disney comedic character, but because he doesn't have song about how much he loves dirt and the fact that he's a human being, not a real mole... well, he doesn't feel out of place.
As a matter of fact there's only one character that feels out of place in the whole movie and that's the teenage chica character Audrey Ramirez, voiced by Jacqueline Obradors. While the other characters in the film visually belong the time period presented (sometime in the early 1900s), her character design is almost pulled directly from the hot Latina style that was in fashion in the late '90s. She wears blue overalls with a white undershirt, sneakers and has a curly hairstyle that I'm quite sure didn't exist (in that form) back in that time.
There's nothing really wrong with her as a character. She is given something to do in the film and doesn't feel like she's just tacked on to draw in the J Lo audience, even though she has one or two lines that lead you to think so. There's one scene where she falls down on her ass, gets up, pats her butt and says something along the lines of "Good thing I have all this padding." But most of her screen time is spent actually contributing to the story, to the situations, etc.
I want to emphasize that this character is a small one and is mostly a decent, interesting character, but is the only character that brought me out of the movie at certain scenes. The voice work on the character was one of the things that kept it from being a total loss. Obradors didn't go and do Rosie Perez or Jerry Springer accents, but actually made it a real character.
The plot of the film is a well used one. A team of specialists go in search of a "treasure" which happens to be a lost city in Disney's Atlantis and mystical triangle in Tomb Raider. The team is really fun to watch and different animation techniques are used with different characters to establish... that's right... character. My favorite looking character in the film is Helga St. Clair, voiced by Claudia Christian, and that's because her badass righthand woman character looks as if she were pulled right out of a Ralph Bakshi film.
As opposed to Tomb Raider, every member of the team in Atlantis is memorable. Now, I'm not saying Atlantis is the best Disney film ever, hell I'm not even saying it's the best Disney animated movie in the last 15 years, but I just love the fact that Disney's breaking its formula for this film. It's still Disney, but slightly harder (just slightly) with no funny songs. The animation is top notch, each character fleshed out visually, each landscape beautiful. Again, I love the fact that they use different styles of animation for different characters. I walked out of Atlantis smiling, which is more than I can say about Tomb Raider.
Fuckin' Tomb Raider, man. I was excited by the project up until the first word of "this movie sucks giant moose balls" started coming in. Even then, I figured I would like the movie. A movie like Tomb Raider really only needs to be fun for me. I can forgive just about anything else in a summer actioneer. Then I saw the damned thing.
Let me start off by comparing this film not to Raiders of the Lost Ark, which will be the first and most obvious comparison, but to this summer's The Mummy Returns. As cheese ball as Mummy Returns is, it got a lot of things right. Pacing, for one. You get a sense of the plot unfolding before you in MR, but in Tomb Raider it literally gets so bad that they end up giving you a voice over about halfway through telling you exactly what is happening, explaining what has happened up to that point and telling us (and Ms. Croft) exactly what needs to be done for the rest of the movie, how to do it and why it needs to be done. It's a complete breaking of the first rule of filmmaking: show, don't tell.
If you thought the CG work in Mummy Returns was bad, just wait until you see Tomb Raider. The robot in the movie looks alright, but Christ... the rest of the stuff is G-rated Playstation game bad. ACTION, for Christ's sake! Tomb Raider has a very Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon action scene with Lara on a bungee cord thingy. You'd think that if they would take the time to choreograph a sequence like that, they'd learn how to shoot it. Watch Crouching Tiger... see how Ang Lee shot the action scenes? He pulled the camera back and let the action last for more than a millisecond.
The action in this film is so sloppy. The cuts are so quick that most of the time you can't tell what's going on in these scenes, let alone feel any sense of danger. The fight scenes have some originality to them, but that doesn't matter because you can't fucking tell what's happening! In Mummy Returns, the action was not only watchable, but involving.
The acting is mediocre at best. The dialogue is painfully bad. The situations vary from alright to what the fuck!?!?!? I mean, I was watching the film with Massawyrm in the seat to my left and there was one scene where Lara is being chased through a jungle, she comes to the edge of a waterfall and behind her appears her chaser, gun in hand. She turns to look at him, still standing at the edge of the waterfall and as she does so Massa and I look at each other and go "I didn't kill my wife!" at the same time, it was so cliched. I swear to God, that was the most fun I had during the film.
It's a shame. I, more than just about anybody, wanted the film to be good. I wanted the movie that would start a new adventure series. I wanted Lara Croft to be the Indiana Jones of this generation. If not that, then at least a fun character to watch through a few fun films. I guess I'll just have to keep my fingers crossed that Lucas, Spielberg and Ford will move their ass and give me one more Indy film before one of them dies.
On that note, squirts, I think I'm going to push off. There's some big catches waiting for me out there. Keep your eyes on the horizon squirties for this old salt has some really cool things to share with you. I've got some really cool scar sharin' coming up a Swinger, another with a guy obsessed with his Red Ryder BB Gun, not to mention the various script reviews, set visits and my grand New York Adventure. 'Til that day, this is Quint over and out.
-Quint
