Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – The Cradle of Life (2003)
★★ — Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – The Cradle of Life (2003)
By the time Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, The Cradle of Life arrived in cinemas in the summer of 2003, the first film had already done the hard work of establishing Angelina Jolie as the big-screen version of Eidos Interactive's iconic archaeologist-adventurer. That 2001 original, which you can read about in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, was a modest commercial success built largely on the strength of its lead performance and the novelty of seeing a beloved video game character realised in live action. A sequel was, commercially speaking, a reasonable bet. What audiences got was a 117-minute globe-trot produced under the banner of Paramount Pictures alongside Lawrence Gordon Productions and Mutual Film Company, with co-production contributions drawn from Germany, Hong Kong, Japan and the United Kingdom alongside the United States.
The director brought in for this second outing was Jan de Bont, a Dutch filmmaker who had made a significant splash in Hollywood with high-velocity thrillers in the 1990s before his subsequent work received a cooler reception. For The Cradle of Life, the premise drops Lara into a race against a bioterrorist villain, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist willing to deploy one of the deadliest known plagues, who is hunting for Pandora's Box, a mythical artefact whose discovery Lara stumbles upon off the coast of Santorini. MI6 conscript her to ensure the box never falls into the wrong hands, and the story proceeds to take her from Greece through China and on to Africa in a breathless (if not always coherent) international chase. It is the sort of premise that, on paper at least, sounds like ideal blockbuster material.
Jolie, returning to a role she had already made her own, is joined by Gerard Butler as a roguish ex-Marine mercenary, Ciarán Hinds in an official capacity, Chris Barrie reprising his role as Lara's butler Hillary, and Noah Taylor as her tech-support ally Bryce. Butler, still a few years away from the wider fame that would come his way later in the decade, is given a part that puts him squarely in Jolie's orbit for much of the running time. Jolie herself had by this point built a reputation for throwing herself into physically demanding roles, a quality that would carry through later work including the animated films Kung Fu Panda and Kung Fu Panda 2, as well as the action-thriller Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Whatever else might be said about the finished product, her commitment to the character is rarely in question.
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider Cradle of Life (2003) is a sequel that manages to be worse than the original, less fun, less coherent, and stripped of even the minimal charm that made the first film a cheesy guilty pleasure. Angelina Jolie returns as Lara, still effortlessly cool, still flipping through ancient traps in skin-tight gear, but this time she’s chasing the mythical Pandora’s Box before a rogue mercenary (Gerard Butler, wasted in a forgettable villain role) can use it to unleash global chaos. The problem is it doubles down on everything that didn’t work the first time. The plot is even more ridiculous, globe-trotting from China to Africa to Greece with zero logic or momentum. The action scenes are louder, flashier, and somehow less exciting, drenched in CGI and shaky cam that makes half of them impossible to follow. And unlike the first film, there’s no sense of adventure, just Lara running from one poorly rendered set piece to the next. Even the campy fun is gone. Jon Voight returns as her eccentric father, but has nothing to do. Ciarán Hinds shows up as a shadowy official and vanishes. And the much-hyped chemistry with Will Yun Lee’s character goes nowhere. It feels rushed, soulless, and completely forgettable. Angelina Jolie still brings her A-game, committed to the bit even when the script clearly isn’t. As a blockbuster it's a failure. As a video game adaptation it's a step backward. As a time capsule of early-2000s excess it’s entertaining in how bad it is. But mostly, it’s just there, a relic best left buried.
I find it hard to disagree with any of that. There is something almost admirable, in a perverse sort of way, about a film that squanders this much talent and this many locations so efficiently. Jolie deserved better material, Butler deserved a proper antagonist's arc, and frankly so did we. For me it sits in that particular category of sequel that exists mostly to remind you how much you preferred the one before it, which was already not exactly Raiders of the Lost Ark. Sometimes a franchise peak is lower than you realised, and this is the film that proves it. Best left in the vault.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2003 | Watched: 2025-10-24
Trailer
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Related on Movies With Macca
More with Angelina Jolie: Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011) · Kung Fu Panda (2008) · Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) · Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005)
More from Germany: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Cemetery Man (1994) · The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) · Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)
More from the 2000s: Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) · Daredevil (2003) · Apocalypto (2006)
More adventure: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · The Eagle (1925) · Louisiana Story (1948) · The General (1926)
More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)
