And yet, we would watch the first TR whenever it was on cable, shaking our heads in bemusement at its weak spots (i.e., plot development and all dialogue) and marveling at Angelina Jolie’s style as the titular heroine. We’re still not completely sure if our crush is on Croft the character, Jolie the actress or a combination of the two, but it’s a crush of junior-high strength and ferocity. It went against our every impulse as a critic, but we looked forward to spending more time with this character, and hoped the script for the sequel would be better.

Better, we would recall after viewing Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (henceforth TR2 for obvious reasons), is a relative term. The plot is still confusing, but it’s not incomprehensible. The dialogue is pretty bad, but it doesn’t make you want to groan. The new TR2 has none of the low points of its predecessor. Unfortunately, though, it doesn’t have as many high points, either.

Of course, there’s no way to re-capture the rush of seeing Jolie as Croft for the first time, though we did note the filmmakers’ attempt at getting some kind of rush out of the audience by putting Jolie in a bikini, jumping waves on a Jet-Ski, for her first scene. This time around, Croft is raiding a submerged temple of Alexander the Great, where she finds a little amber globe---and heavily armed competition for the globe.

Turns out the trinket has something to do with the mythical Pandora’s Box, which itself turns out to be some kind of ancient biological weapon. As in the first movie, a sleazy middle-aged white guy wants the weapon, although why he wants to be around when it’s opened is beyond us; the last place we’d want to be is ground zero for demons or plague germs. But maybe the screenwriters knew something we don’t---something they cleverly kept out of the script, where it might have made sense.

TR2 focuses less on fighting and more on exploring---and while that’s noble, we don’t watch action movies to be ennobled. We watch them to see kick-ass fight scenes, impossible stunts and Shit Blowing Up. We watch them to go “oooh” at least once. For all its many flaws, TR1 had at least one such “oooh” moment, as Croft did a sort of bungee ballet in her jammies, suspended from the ceiling of her enormous manor house. It was acrobatic and elegant, and captured the strength and grace of both Croft and Jolie. There’s no such moment in TR2, not even when Croft pole-vaults from a rooftop to the landing gear of a helicopter. Think about that---how do you fail to make such a move yield even one “oooh!” from the audience?

If you’re director Jan de Bont, you kill the “oooh” the same way you kill the laughter, the suspense and the tension throughout the picture: by removing all semblance of pacing and dynamics. The movie has no breaks in the plodding of action, no moments of relative quiet to offset the running, the riding, the shooting, the skydiving. We’re pretty sure there were some funny bits in the script, but those lines weren’t given the time for set-up and reaction they needed. And what happens to a joke deferred? It dries up, like a Raisinet under the seat.

The problem extends to de Bont’s apparent direction of the actors. Jolie nails her English accent this time out, but all of her dialogue has the same inflection: breezy. Call us bleeding hearts, but “breezy” doesn’t seem quite appropriate for discussing mass murder, deadly plagues or doomed love affairs. In particular, the confrontation at the end has no real resonance because we’ve gotten the impression throughout the movie that Croft had no emotional investment in, well, anything. We know Jolie can run through the full spectrum of human emotion before breakfast, so we can’t help but blame the director for Croft’s apparent ennui.

Well, that and the fact that we’re basically Angelina Jolie’s bitch.

Gadgetgirl