Lara Croft: Tomb Raider II

Another video game film. This one’s considerably better than the first one, though.

Diving off the coast of Santorin (the sometime Atlantis, though they don’t mention this in the film, since they overused Atlantis in the first film), Lara (Angelina Jolie) and two companions discover a temple of Alexander the Great, deep under the ocean, where it has somehow managed to hold breathable air for almost two and a half millenia. However, Lara’s companions are murdered by the evil Chen Lo (Simon Yam), leader of the Xie Ling bandits, who steals the Orb which serves as a map to the Cradle of Life, where Pandora’s Box is hidden. Turns out that the Box is full of a terrible mankind-decimating plague, which evil scientist and Nobel laureate Jonathan Reiss (Ciaran Hinds) wants to use to get rid of us hoi polloi, and at a profit. Lara, along with renegade British soldier and sometime chief squeeze Tony Sheridan (Gerard Butler), whom she rescues from a prison in the snowy wilds of Kazakhstan, chases Chen Lo to China, rescues the orb from Reiss, and manages to find the Cradle, with Reiss hot on her tail all the way.

There were some annoying features to the film, but I doubt whether most people would have been bothered by them. Lara and Terry whup the Xie Ling bandits in a rocky mountain range 74 kilometers from Shanghai — anybody familiar with the topography of that part of China will have to look awfully hard for a mountain range in that particular neighborhood. And getting there from the Great Wall in a couple of hours, even by motorcycle, strikes me as a feat worthy of respect, given the distances involved. ⁽¹⁾ Shanghai itself looks more like San Francisco’s Chinatown at night than it looks like Shanghai; or, more accurately, it reminds one of the “Shanghai” at the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Modern Hong Kong is really impressive, however. Africa looks very much like Africa, which is surprising, since as one Tarzan moviemaker once put it, “most of Africa looks more like Arizona than it looks like Africa”. Stunts and cinematography are excellent, as is the unfortunately short segment with the Shadow Warriors.

I enjoyed it — certainly more than I enjoyed the first one. (And Angelina Jolie is worth watching, too, as usual.)

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⁽¹⁾ Perhaps in China they make movies where you leave New York on a Harley, cross the surrounding desert complete with cacti and Joshua trees, and arrive a couple of hours later in the mountain range in the Miami suburbs. Don Harlow, July 26, 2003 09:50 PM

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