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by Cole Smithey
Evolution
Director Ivan Reitman’s Evolution could be the runaway hit of the summer as a chain of upcoming blockbuster misfires comes rolling out. Reitman, famous for directing such comic hits as Stripes and Ghostbusters, works his hilarious movie magic with a cookie-cutter story about a couple of Arizona community college professors who discover a quickly mutating alien life-form oozing from the surface of a new-fallen meteor. Ira Kane (David Duchovny) is a former pentagon biologist who was fired because an anti-Anthrax vaccine he developed had a laundry list of nasty side effects on its subjects. Ira’s partner-in-slime Harry Block (Orlando Jones) is a skirt chasing science teacher with Pulitzer Prize stars in his eyes. As the ooze abruptly morphs from star-shaped amoebas into a veritable jungle of bizarre creatures, the U.S. military steps in to muck up the earth-threatening disaster as only authority figures can do when aliens invade from outer space.
Most of the kicks and belly laughs in Evolution come from a combination of the film’s outlandish creatures (created by visual effects wiz Phil Tippett – Starship Troopers) and Orlando Jones’ scene-stealing fast-twitch-ligamentation. As David Duchovny pokes subtle jabs at his own “X-Files” Fox Mulder character, Jones goes haywire with a barrage of rubber-faced expressions and rapid-fire quips. The seamless energy between Jones and Duchovny hits a high note when the two belt out Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music” while driving in a convertible after having just killed a flying dinosaur in a strip mall with the help of Wayne (Seann William Scott - Dude, Where’s My Car?).
Wayne, a wanna-be fireman, who was busy practicing his lifesaving technique in the middle of the desert when the meteor struck, is a devilish comic foil who links the movie to younger audiences. Julianne Moore (Hannibal) is Alison, a klutzy epidemiologist working for the pentagon who falls under Ira’s romantic spell. The main problem with Moore’s character is that Alison never gets enough screen time for an audience to enjoy the full impact of her pratfalls. Nonetheless, Moore is comfortable in her against-type casting and adds a welcome dimension of female ingenuity to the movie.
Evolution is a spasmodic comedy that that jolts audiences with half-expected surprises that happen whenever the story reveals yet another mutation of alien creature. Sight gags of body snatching and hand biting saturate the movie with a proper Mars Attacks brand of B-movie wackiness. Harry suffers the alien infestation hardest when a creature that looks like a cross between a mosquito and a hummingbird makes its way inside his protective suit and inside Harry’s skin. The extraction of the mighty bug from Harry’s nether regions gives Jones a chance to do a bit of spirited caricature facial morphing that makes for a very funny hospital scene.
Ivan Reitman knowingly taps his knack for visual flair to super-impose an ironic sensibility onto the Arizona landscape that the aliens attack. By keeping a running oddball cinematic commentary with its world of country clubs, shopping malls, and the Glen Canyon community college, Reitman nails home the idea that this comedy is part and parcel to America in the same way that Ghostbusters followed its urban setting. While there are a few jokes that fall flat, there’s enough kooky momentum to keep the movie floating to its next funny reward.
It’s refreshing to watch Duchovny schmoozing it up as an over-achieving college professor with a grudge against the pentagon, and Orlando Jones proves himself to be the next Jerry Lewis. You don’t know what kind of creature you’re going to see next in Evolution, but you do know that they’re going to be bigger and better than the last one. And that’s the kind of expectation and payoff that blockbuster comedies are made from. Based solely on the beautifully crafted creatures and special effects, Evolution has pre-emptively stolen the thunder from the upcoming sequel nightmare of Jurassic Park III. As for the upcoming remake of Planet of the Apes, there are even a couple of “no-nosed” blue simians in Evolution for all your movie pleasure.
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
The cool thing about playing first class video games like the latest version of “Tomb Raider” is that the player can make the principal character do a variety of actions that give the player a sense of playing God and semi-indestructible human at the same time. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider will be unimpressive to “Tomb Raider” players, who expect more accidents and surprises from Lara, and to movie audiences, who expect a story arc with defined characters when they go to the movies.
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider is an experiment to see how the counterfeit genre of video-game-based-movies can do with the aid of on-target casting (Angelina Jolie is perfect for filling the tight shorts of the Lara Croft ideal), and a proven action movie director (Simon West - Con Air, The General’s Daughter). It’s not so much that the franchise owners don’t already know that the experiment will fail (see Super Mario Brothers or Mortal Kombat), it’s really about how much profit can be turned before audiences realize that they’ve been had.
Everything about the movie has a “going through the motions feel” to it. In the opening scene, Lara is pitted against a vicious giant robot that turns out to be a practice aid that her personal technician built to hone Lara’s fighting skills. Lara is a British archaeologist and sometime journalist with a lot of enemies and a sporting chip on her shoulder. In the next big scene a heavily armed SWAT style army invades Lara’s spacious mansion to steal an ancient clock, interrupting Lara doing a bungee-suspended martial arts ballet to a Bach concerto in her anteroom. Lara quickly dispatches the black-clad soldiers and finishes the battle with a crowd-pleasing motorcycle front-wheel wheelie while bullets blaze from her machine gun.
The unusual clock, left to Lara by her deceased father, is the key to an ancient talisman called the Triangle of Light, which gives its possessor the power to control time i.e. “the power of God.” But the key can only be used during a solar eclipse that occurs every 5000 years, and an evil group called the Illuminati wants it for their own. The triangle was broken in two and it’s halves buried in different parts of the world just to keep people like the Illuminati and Lara away from its potential for apocalyptic disaster. Manfred Powell (Iain Glen) is the Illuminati’s sleazy leader busy taunting Lara with an opportunity to reunite with her father (played by Jon Voight) if she helps him get the triangle. The scriptwriters seem to have missed the point that Lara could very easily bend time herself with the power of the triangle without Powell’s annoying presence. But that’s getting picky.
Lara has a soft spot for the memory of her father that serves as her oh-so obvious Achilles heel throughout the story and gives room for lots of flashback exposition by Lord Croft (Jon Voight). The movie touts the first incident in which Angelina Jolie acts opposite her real-life father on film, and there is a decent amount of filial impact to their one scene together. While Jon Voight’s inestimable talents are squandered on his perfunctory role in Tomb Raider, Jolie proves herself to be up to the task of creating a spunky female James Bond action-hero for whatever upcoming roles may be offered her after this movie flops.
Lara gets to kick ass and save the world after being dropped off in a fully loaded Hummer by helicopter to the final location of knife-throwing, sword-slinging gun-shooting mayhem. Angelina Jolie is a positively transfixing actress with more charm and nuance in her bottom lip than this pseudo action flick strains to conjure in lush locations like Cambodia. As 12-year-old kids return to their “Tomb Raider” video games, after seeing this movie, they will at least be able to imagine Angelina Jolie as the Lara Croft they control on their computer screens. But for the rest of us, who wasted two hours on the movie, it’s about the after-effect of marketing and sex appeal to make us want something we don’t want: tedious entertainment.
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