Tomb Raider: Cradle of Life: Just another bad sequel

Life is full of mysteries. And one of the biggest mysteries of all is why Hollywood insists on creating sequels to movies that are already repetitive, confusing, and implausible.

Take, for instance, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life. While the second Tomb Raider film is much better than the first, this movie is still so unrealistic that it makes The Little Mermaid look like a documentary.

Once again, Angelina Jolie, starring as Lara Croft, straps on her twelve push-up bras and her well-hidden, seemingly unlimited supply of handguns. Once again, she is accompanied by her two best friends and the brains to her brawn, Hillary (Chris Barrie) and Bryce (Noah Taylor). Once again, she travels the world looking for another lost artifact. And once again, she must out-smart and pummel hundreds of evil bad guys who follow closely at her heel in hopes of using said artifact for their own personal gain.

However, as noted above, the second Tomb Raider film is still better than its predecessor, though made in accordance with the same formula. While the first film's plot was full of massive holes, the plot of the sequel is at least coherent as it followed a mad scientist looking for a weapon which he could translate into wealth beyond his wildest dreams.

In The Cradle of Life, Jonathan Reiss (Ciarán Hinds) is said scientist and a supplier of the world's deadliest biological weapons. In league with Chen Lo (Simon Yam), the leader of a Chinese crime syndicate, Reiss is in search of the legendary Pandora's Box which, when opened, will release doomsday upon Earth. Lara Croft is hired by the Queen of England and the ultimate cinematic intelligence agency, "MI-6," to track down Lo and put a stop to Reiss's plans. To help her on her quest, Croft enlists her sexy former lover Terry Sheridan (Gerald Butler). Sheridan is a former traitor to England who was in cahoots with Lo's gang, so his knowledge of the group helps Croft, while his traitorous past makes her wary.

The movie is filled with action scenes where Croft kicks butt and wins, even when the fights boil down, as they inevitably do, to a fight between our heroine and countless bad guys. Thanks to the hopelessly lop-sided fights and the imaginative, though wildly implausible, archeological "artifacts" inspiring legions of erstwhile treasure-hunters, the movie soon becomes nothing more than Indiana Jones in a wonder bra, but without the realism, humor, and heart of Indiana Jones. At no point in the movie does any event or plot twist resemble something even close to reality. For example, where Indiana Jones manages to work up a sweat and accumulate some grime, Lara Croft achieves the impossibly sterile lifestyle of a video game.

In fact, the script makes Croft so invulnerable that the audience soon ceases to cringe at every narrow escape or insurmountable obstacle she faces. There is always some incredibly unrealistic escape route, like the shark that, attracted to Croft's self-inflicted cut, helps Croft swim from an underwater temple to the surface of the water more than one hundred feet above just in time for her to be picked up by a submarine.

The only thing the Tomb Raider movies have done right is to cast Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft. She is the perfect Lara, consistently maintaining a sullen, invulnerable façade throughout the movie and looking great in the eminently predictable, breast-enhanced video game uniforms that pass for "high-fashion" in the limited visual palette of this movie. Jolie's ability to dominate a scene, capture an audience's attention, and introduce at least some element of drama into this movie allows her to rise above the material and made at least one member of the audience grateful for her presence.