Have you seen Raiders of the Lost Ark? The 1970s Bond films? Charlie's Angels? Batman? I hope you have, because then there's no reason for you to endure Tomb Raider (12), the greatest atrocity committed this century in the name of movie entertainment.

Don't get me wrong there's nothing wrong with silly action blockbusters; those mentioned above are fantastic examples of comicbook nonsense married to slick direction and pure entertainment. But the vast scale of this computer game tie-in's lack of fun is enough to put anyone off fantasy action films for life.

Comely grave-robber Lara Croft (Angelina Jolie) has a happy life, stealing valued artefacts from other cultures' sacred monuments before returning to her country pile, but she pines for the father she lost as a child. When daddy (Jon Voight) appears to her in a dream, she begins a mission to save the world fromwell it's never really explained.

But it involves her jumping around in little shorts and tight tops, so I guess we can excuse the film-makers thinking they didn't need a plot. Aided by her crusty butler (Chris Barrie) and geeky sidekick (Noah Taylor), she sets off to stop, er, whatever evil it is.

It's basically a Bond film, or Raiders of the Lost Ark, which was based on the Bond films anyway. There's the pre-credits malarkey, a twisted villain, long fight sequences, escapes, captures, gags, gadgets and daft switches of location.

But where those movies succeeded was in creating a bizarre world in which fun and adventurous things happened in a cheerable, exciting way, pleasing the kids and bringing out the kid in the adult viewer. Tomb Raider doesn't it's too laboured, and starts to pall very quickly as the pace fails to meet the viewer's expectations.

Even the villain is poor. Manfred Powell (Iain Glen) is not interesting enough to be loathsome, and hardly engenders the same feelings of injustice as the megalomaniac Bond villains.

And it might be this lack of good against evil, authority against anarchy, righteous revenge against hatred, which makes the film so unengaging. Powell's only crime is in being just a bit too greedy.

And Angelina Jolieoh, what a waste. She tries her best, she really does, bouncing off walls, shooting people and having punch-ups, all the time grunting and panting her way through the fights as if she's overdubbing a Swedish special interest video.

But humour, charm and wit are absent, much as she tries, with all the panache of a wet haddock on a slab, to deliver comic lines. And since the camera lingers longest over her bouncing chest and her lithe, pert thighs, there's not much for her to do when it gets round to her face other than pout and raise her eyebrows like a third-rate Roger Moore.

The only reason to pay money for this is if you're a teenage boy who's never seen girls before. It is truly weak, unsexy, drawn-out, pointless, inadequate and downright dull. How something so promising could have been made so dreary is the real mystery here.

Steven Baxter