Crofting dialogue

(I know, that was terrible.)

One of the things I really like about the gym Ann and I go to is the Cardio Cinema. If your gym doesn't have one of these (poor, poor bastard), it's basically a dark room with a bunch of machines -- exercise bikes, elliptical machines, treadmills -- all facing a theater-sized screen, where a movie plays on continuous loop all day. They show a different movie every day, which does lead to the CC's biggest drawback, namely that it's a total crapshoot. One day you might stumble onto Die Hard and exercise until your legs fall off just to watch the whole thing, but then it'll be three straight days of chick flicks and Tim Allen movies, exiling you to the magazine rack for alternate entertainment.

But today the rack held nothing but muscle magazines and Vibe, sending me up to the Cardio Cinema to discover that the film du jour was Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life. Hmmm... tough call, but the lure of possibly seeing Angelina Jolie in a fitted aqua green tanktop was enough to tip the scales slightly in that direction, and I reasoned I could always block out the dialogue with my iPod if it got bad enough.

Now, I only caught 20 minutes of the film, but two scenes stuck out at me. The first finds Angelina Jolie pensively staring off into space, probably wondering how much a hit on Jennifer Aniston would cost and whether it's tax deductible. She's clad in some kind of daishiki thing, the kind that shows exactly enough cleavage to make teenage boys think maybe they're about to see a glimpse of nipple that somehow eluded the team of 82 censors who pre-screened the movie. Sadly, this does not happen. (Although it would have made the movie five hundred times better.) Instead, her love interest, played by Gerard Butler, decides a bright idea would be to sneak up on this extremely angry, trigger-happy woman, as characters in movies so often think. So he steals up and touches her shoulder, whereupon Lara busts out some hardcore ninjitsu move that ends with her clamping his wrist and Gerard Butler on his knees in front of her, a situation I'm fairly certain is not the most unpleasant one Ms. Jolie has ever found herself in. He then says -- and this is true, I'm not making it up -- "You can break my wrist if you want to, I'm still going to kiss you."

At this point, naturally, I and the rest of the rational world get excited by the fact that she's clearly going to forcefeed him his testicles. But instead, she lets him up and kisses him passionately, like he didn't just utter the single most asinine seduction line in the history of seduction, or lines. And then it occurs to me that if this is the kind of crap repartee that flies with rich, attractive adventurers with British accents, well, I just might be willing to take that hit. Can anyone confirm this?

Anyway, the second stupid moment occurs a couple of scenes after that. Angelina has recruited the help of a native African tribe, as one does in such situations, to help recover the special treasure. To help lead her to it, she's got a special glowing orb thingie that doubles as a bowling ball on Thursday nights. She and the primitive African tribe who still think spears are a pretty good weapon are hiking toward the location of the treasure, and apropos of nothing, Angelina busts out with "We're getting closer." The Wise Old Black Man (WOBM) feels compelled to ask how she knows that. I feel that his sarcasm is implicit, but Angelina apparently doesn't pick up on it, because she responds quite matter-of-factly "I can feel it." Instead of laughing in her face, the WOBM just kind of nods sagely, but you can tell he's thinking, Uh, I think the reason you know we're getting closer is because we told you we're taking you to it, and we have, in fact, traveled some distance since we started. Ergo, yes, we are getting closer. Dumb bitch. However, since she's Angelina and him saying so would minimize the chances that she'll ever adopt him, he just remains silent.

So that was my experience with Tomb Raider. I doubt that I'll ever see the rest of it, unless someone can confirm that it ends with her coming across an empty cavern and a guardian who tells her that a rugged, stubbly archaeologist absconded with it over half a century ago, complaining about being too old all the while. That, I will pay good money to go rent.