Grade: C+

Verdict: Game over.

Details: Starring Angelina Jolie. Directed by Simon West. Rated PG-13 for action violence and some sensuality. One hour, 43 minutes.

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Review: Angelina Jolie looks just about perfect in the video-game-screen-to-big-screen transfer of “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.”

She's got the build. She's got the hair. She's got the way-cool party revolvers strapped to her formidable thighs.

All she really needs is a personality.

Like Lara, the costly “Tomb Raider” (with an $80 million budget that reportedly nudged its way toward $100 million) is an empty shell. About all you can really say about this movie is: nice sets.

Oh, there's plenty of knockout action. Lara blasting her guns and duking it out with a huge, spidery terminator robot. Lara blasting her guns and duking it out with giant monkey statues that spring to life. Lara blasting her guns and duking it out with an army of black-clad nighttime invaders out to steal the story's important whatsit clock gadget from her stately and splendidly accessorized mansion.

The movie even has a terrific moment or two. As when, racing through the underbelly of her mansion on a motorbike during that nighttime raid, Lara does a front wheelie and twists the vehicle around so that the back wheel slaps an invader to the ground. Now that's cool.

But for the life of them, “Tomb Raider's” six writers couldn't muster up much material to nudge Lara to life. She's a mono-voiced, steely-eyed superwoman. As bored by danger as moviegoers could get by watching her.

In a video game, Lara should be pretty much a blank. After all, it's the game player who invests in the darned thing by pushing all those controller buttons. You want to win, carpal tunnel syndrome be damned.

But the big screen requires an investment of emotion from its passive audience. You get that in successful movies, through James Bond's audacious humor, Indiana Jones' making-it-up-as-he-goes-along vulnerability, Ellen Ripley's fear-fueled fearlessness in the face of acid-blooded aliens.

“Tomb Raider” simply dumps emotion for visual acuity. And it does so sometimes at the speed of “The Mummy Returns.”

The plot makes about as much sense as that movie, too. Our heroine is caught in a fast-paced race with evil and ill-defined forces to recover antiquities that, when all put together, will give the possessor control of time. Or, as the movie rightly translates such mumbo jumbo, somebody's going to get to play God.

There's mucho globe-trotting. A jungle tomb in Cambodia. A packed-in-ice tomb in Siberia. Venice. Britain. And, as you'd expect in a movie like this, travel time is no factor.

The movie's ultimate bad guy, Manfred Powell (Iain Glen), has even less substance than Lara. He's stuck with doing no more than whispering his evil, reciting every line as if he's the vexed villain of “Gladiator.”

Jolie, an Oscar winner for “Girl, Interrupted,” is good. Amid all the elaborate sets and fast-cut action, she maintains a solid presence. The problem here is that she doesn't have enough to work with. Ultimately, the writers and director Simon West (“The General's Daughter”) are responsible.

They've taken a mega-popular video game and turned it into a mega-void.

— Bob Longino, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution