The action movie Angelina Jolie regrets making: “It wasn’t sexy enough”
Today, Angelina Jolie is as well known for her humanitarian work as she is for her filmography. But, at one point, it was Jolie’s acting efforts that persistently drew attention to the daughter of actor Jon Voight. Notably, it was her excellent performance in 1999’s drama Girl, Interrupted, alongside Winona Ryder, that saw Jolie be considered a serious force in cinema.
Jolie would go on to star in tremendous Hollywood hits such as Wanted, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Salt, and Clint Eastwood’s Changeling to establish her presence in Hollywood. The actor also turned director in the 2010s with the movies In the Land of Blood and Honey, Unbroken, and First They Killed My Father to yet more signs of success.
Between Girl, Interrupted and those later successes, Jolie found herself in one of her most memorable acting roles, the action video-game adaptation Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, directed by Simon West. The project saw Jolie portray the famous video game archaeologist as she ventures the world in search of ancient artefacts whilst the heat from the Illuminati is cranked right the way up.
However, Jolie was less than happy with the final film. She once said in an interview: “I wasn’t satisfied with it. Through the making of that film, we were all still trying to figure out how things worked, and we were trying to make the video game into a person, but still, it was the video game, and still, she was a video vixen, and she wasn’t quite a solid woman with emotions and feelings.”
The actor continued: “Even the way she looked wasn’t to me sexy and real enough. So there were a lot of things, and we couldn’t adjust to everything right.” While a large part of the 2001 movie’s allure was that it had sex appeal, evidently, it wasn’t quite enough for Jolie. The film production sounded like a mess, lacking in conceptual innovation and accurate execution.
Jolie herself was not the only actor to express her dissatisfaction with the movie, though. Daniel Craig, who also starred, once said: “On something like Tomb Raider, they didn’t have a script. So that’s as simple as that. You can’t start a film without a script. Tomb Raider slowed things down for me.”
Craig added: “It was the worst mistake I’ve made. But it was also a good lesson. The script on that was all over the fucking place, waffling on about eight-foot fucking green monkeys or some such bollocks, and I could just never get my head around what was supposed to be going on.” So it’s easy to see why the film was not the best-received of either actor’s career thus far.
