What do young women really want to be like? Marie Curie?
The Bobsey Twins? Hillary Clinton? Hardly. Just ten minutes
into Jan de Bont's "Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life"
you're convinced that every lass wants to be either Angelina
Jolie or more likely, Lara Croft. Perfect body, cool Spandex
threads, able to leap tall cliffs at a single bound or ride a bike
across rocky cliffs; well, maybe without that symbolic chastity
belt that Laura wears outside her silvery outfit to signal her
inaccessibility since she's too busy saving the world to be
concerned about her love life--even given the unextinguished
tension with a charismatic boyfriend with a West Highland
accent. In "The Cradle of Life," Lara (Angelina Jolie, who
shapely lips aside bears a distinct resemblance to Jon Voight)
must get to Pandora's Box before the villainous scientist,
Dr. Jonathan Reiss (Ciaran Hinds) gets his hands on it. To
speed her on the way, she enlists the support of a former crush,
Terry Sheridan (Gerard Butler), whom she breaks out of a
Kazakhstan prison with the blessings of Her Majesty, a guy
too ambitious to be trusted even with the offer of big bucks upon
completion of his assignment.
As in most James Bond pics, the chief villain wants nothing
less than world domination--in this case a renegade scientist
with a Nazi-like plan to wipe out the world with a deadly
poison--except for a few ubermenchen who will receive the
antidote and who will presumably submit to his rule. The
scientist, Dr. Reiss, assembles an international circle of bidders
for the stuff, despotic types from Serbia, Asia and Central
Europe, who are given capsules that will protect them
from the effects. To show he means business, Reiss pulls a
"Godfather" shtick, poisoning one in his circle whom he labels a
traitor, ready to sell out the project and find asylum in the West.
Jan de Bont takes us on an adventurous tour beginning on a
Greek island, where an unexplained attack by gunmen leads
Lara to a lost, underwater Greek temple (which is destroyed),
then to Hong Kong and Shanghai with a side trip to The Great
Wall, finally to East Africa (filmed in Kenya and Tanzania) where
the race between Hinds and Croft for Pandora's Box is joined.
As Croft explains early on, the box, which arrived to Earth
from outer space where it was discovered in The Cradle of Life
in Egypt of 2300 B.C., was seized 200 years later by Alexander
the Great who hid the box in the temple. Somehow the box
arrives in Africa, its location made clear by a golden orb which
acts as a kind of Rosetta Stone to pinpoint the location.
More Indiana Jones than James Bond, Lara Croft
adventures into deep sea diving, taking Spiderman-like
leaps across skyscrapers, hopping motorcycle rides, parasail
jumps, finally taking over the driving of a land rover piloted by
her contact in Kenya, Masai warrior Kosa (Djimon Hounsou)
who translates the sage advice from the village chief from
Swahili.
This sequel to Simon West's version of Lara Croft Tomb
Raider made in 2001 is the superior one, substituting exciting
stunts for the dull action scenes two years ago wherein Lara
was instructed by her father to find and destroy pieces of an
ancient relic that control time. The locales appears as realistic
as they are exotic, with Lara, though occasionally captured only
to bounce back because once again the malefactors talk rather
than shoot, proving that she could conceivably take on Charlie's
Angels one by one.
Copyright © 2003 Harvey Karten
