LARA CROFT TOMB RAIDER: THE CRADLE OF LIFE []
Sequel undermined by lame romance and lamer action. Running time: 96 minutes. Rated PG-13 (violence). At the Ziegfeld, the E Walk, others.
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SPECTACULARLY embodied by Angelina Jolie, Lara Croft has evolved from a character in a computer game into the epitome of Hollywood’s notion of “girl power.”
The first of what may well be an action franchise with legs was 2001’s hugely successful but critically panned “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.”
This sequel, clumsily titled, “Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life,” has the same two things going for it: Angelina Jolie’s amazing attractiveness (a combination of presence, charm and preternatural good looks) and gorgeous locations.
This franchise has taken over from the Bond films in the way it luxuriates in the glamour of travel to places like Cambodia and East Africa.
The film also boasts one truly innovative stunt in which two people jump off a building and fly, using wing suits.
But its faults – banal dialogue, ludicrous and uninspired plotting, dull but vicious fight scenes – make you realize just how much the summer action movie has declined in the last few years.
Especially when you compare it with the movies that are clearly the inspiration for the whole franchise: the Indiana Jones series and imperial exploration predecessors like “King Solomon’s Mines” and “She.”
The film opens in the Aegean as an earthquake wrecks an island wedding and guides wealthy, justly arrogant Lady Lara Croft (Jolie) – wearing first a bikini, then a spectacular silver wet suit with what appear to be prosthetic nipples – to a long-lost temple beneath the waves.
There she finds – and loses – a mysterious yellow orb. Almost immediately, Lara guesses that the orb contains a map to the location of Pandora’s Box.
Like so many of the ancient artifacts the tomb raider seeks, the legendary box is worth killing and dying for: Inside is stored a super disease sought by evil billionaire scientist Reiss (Ciaran Hinds).
The British intelligence agency MI-5 decides that only Lara is capable of stopping Reiss and hires her to do so, though her price includes releasing from jail the traitorous mercenary Sheridan (Gerard Butler), who turns out to be Lara’s former lover.
He’s in the movie as part of the filmmakers’ attempt to give the main character a more interesting inner life.
But because he’s so unattractive, and he and Lara have so little chemistry, their renewed romance only slows the movie down.
This is a problem because the story line – crudely concocted by a trio of remarkably tone-deaf writers to justify a series of action set pieces – contains so little drama.
Unlike Indiana Jones or Allan Quartermain, Lara is almost superhuman, and you never doubt for a second that she’ll win every battle.
Worse still, many of the fight scenes are speeded up until they look jarringly fake. There are also an excessive number of pointless close-ups, which convey only the fact that Jolie – on top of her other physical assets – has wonderfully clear skin.
Handsome Djimon Hounsou plays a noble African friend for what seems the umpteenth time (“Gladiator,” “The Four Feathers”). Noah Taylor and Christopher Barrie return as Lara’s right-hand men, but get much less screen time.
These days, many of Hollywood’s outstanding purveyors of summer action schlock – Roland Emmerich, Paul Verhoeven, Wolfgang Petersen, Tony Scott – are Europeans, so it should come as no surprise that the helmer of “LC 2” is Jan (“Speed,” “Twister”) de Bont of Holland.
