Lara Croft: Tomb Raider

Angelina Jolie incarnates the popular video game heroine in the opening salvo of a planned film franchise. Credited writers are Patrick Massett and John Zinman, but they’re just the visible end of the interminable tinkering (by 11 writers in all) that accompanied Lara’s transition from CD-ROM to screen. Massett, Zinman and director Simon West cleverly duplicate the game—the globetrotting locations, the massive Rube Goldberg machines, the legions of faceless bad guys who come from nowhere to be blown away—but they never succeed in grafting a coherent story onto all the derring-do; merchandising, not story-telling, is this movie’s forte. Jolie strides through it all with sardonic aplomb, and her real-life dad, Jon Voight, has moments as Lara’s father, but other actors make little impression.