The 2003 sequel Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – The Cradle of Life gives Angelina Jolie a bigger sandbox and a smaller return. Jan de Bont directs a globe-trotting hunt for Pandora’s Box that runs 117 minutes and never finds a reason to stop moving. It is a better-made film than the 2001 original. It is also a less successful one, and the gap between those two facts is the whole story of this franchise.
Trailer, via YouTube Movies.
A Golden Orb Off Santorini
The film opens on the Greek island of Santorini, where an earthquake uncovers the Luna Temple, built by Alexander the Great to house his treasures. Inside sits a glowing orb etched with a pattern that works like a code. Lara Croft and her crew find it, then lose it to Chen Lo and his brother Xien, crime lords who run the Chinese syndicate Shay Ling.
Lara escapes with a medallion. The orb, we learn, is a map to the Cradle of Life, where Pandora’s Box is hidden. The box supposedly holds a deadly plague, the companion to the origin of life itself. MI6 wants it kept away from Dr. Jonathan Reiss, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist turned bioweapons dealer.
Terry Sheridan and the Deal
Lara agrees to help MI6 on one condition: they release Terry Sheridan, a former Marine turned mercenary and her old flame. Gerard Butler plays him. He knows Chen Lo’s operation, which is the excuse the script needs to pair him with Lara.
That pairing should carry the movie. It half does. Butler has the right build for a mercenary and the wrong amount of material to work with. The romance is asserted rather than built, and the film keeps cutting away from it to chase the next set piece.
Chen Lo’s Lair and the Terracotta Soldiers
The infiltration of Chen Lo’s lair is the best sequence in the film. Chen Lo is smuggling Terracotta Soldiers. Lara beats him in a fight and learns the orb has moved to Shanghai.
Critics at the time considered the sequel better than its predecessor, and the action sequences were the reason they gave. That judgment holds up here more than anywhere else in the movie.
Reiss and the Plague He Wants to Sell
Ciarán Hinds plays Reiss with a cold, tidy menace that the rest of the movie does not match. He is a misanthrope with a plan to unleash the plague and save only the people he chooses. That is a real villain’s motive, and Hinds sells it.
The film does not know what to do with him. Reiss captures Lara and reveals his plans, and the plot resumes. A villain this good deserved a script that trusted him to carry more than exposition.
What the Sequel Fixed
Credit where it is due. The Cradle of Life is a cleaner machine than Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. The action is staged with more confidence, the locations are used rather than merely named, and Jolie is more settled in the role. She was always the correct choice for Lara Croft, and she remains the reason to watch.
The supporting cast is deep on paper. Noah Taylor returns as Bryce, Chris Barrie as Hillary, and the film adds Djimon Hounsou as Kosa and Til Schweiger as Sean, with Simon Yam as Chen Lo. Few of them get enough screen time to register as more than furniture.
Here is what the film gets right, in order of how much it matters:
- Jolie as Lara Croft, still the definitive screen version of the character.
- The Chen Lo lair sequence, the one stretch with real momentum.
- Ciarán Hinds as Reiss, a villain with an actual worldview.
- The globe-trotting scale, which at least looks like money on screen.
The Box Office Math
The Cradle of Life grossed $160.1 million. Its predecessor grossed $275 million. Paramount released this one in the United States on July 25, 2003, and the drop was steep.
Plans for a sequel were made and then abandoned when Jolie decided not to return as Croft. That is the honest verdict on this movie, delivered by the person who mattered most to it. The 2018 reboot, simply titled Tomb Raider, started over with Alicia Vikander in the role.
Metacritic puts the film at 43 out of 100. The published critical score is 4.3/10.
The Part Worth Keeping
The Cradle of Life is a sequel that improved the craft and lost the audience, and both halves of that are instructive. The action is better. The box office is worse. Jolie is better. The original run of Tomb Raider films ends here.
What the film proves is that the Tomb Raider movies never solved their central problem: Lara Croft works as a character because she is alone in a tomb, and these films keep handing her a team, a love interest, a government handler, and a villain with a monologue. The Cradle of Life adds all four and subtracts the stillness.
The 2003 film is not a disaster. It is a competent adventure that mistakes motion for momentum, and it ends a series that had one genuinely great asset in Jolie and never found a second one. The reboot got a fresh start. This one got a send-off it did not quite earn.
4.3 of 10.
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