Flak Magazine: Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, 08-04-03

I am frightened of Angelina Jolie's vagina. This is because of Simon West, the director of the first Lara Croft Tomb Raider, who perpetually subjected us to long, intimidating shots of Lara's crotch — before battles, he would focus intently on Jolie's gunbelt-beslung hips before panning up to her breasts, which bulged like sexy warheads. Such treatment made Croft the icon of Hollywood's sexy-tough superwomen, manufactured to fully satisfy the male id — a completely fuckable protector figure to trump even Charlie's Angels or WWF's Chyna.

While there's a bit of a joke in those women's ass-kicking, there's no joke to Croft: West took the qualities that, per Rosalind Coward, women find attractive in men, but that postmodern feminists have chosen to mock — power, privilege and emotional distance — and made them precisely the source of Croft's strength. She dominates with her battle prowess, funds her expeditions via her family's bottomless estate and is invulnerable to men's seduction. The latter points up Croft's ambivalence toward sex; she's still pouting over the loss of her daddy, the family's patriarchal tomb raider.

This is where the first Tomb Raider gets really creepy: Lara Croft is a dominatrix with an acute Electra complex who craves love from her dead father and, having found a time machine, is given the chance to resurrect him. Paramount's ads expressly told us that "Angelina Jolie is Lara Croft," and boy, is she: The actress, already dogged by a disconcerting display of affection to her half-brother on Oscar night, is here cast opposite her estranged real-life father, Jon Voight, as Papa Croft, and they share a touching moment together in the very seams of the space-time continuum. If that's not enough to weird you out, there's always the scene in which, in order to unleash her dad's spirit, she straddles a giant obelisk pendulum and rides it into the Eternal Triangle of Life.

Thus we see the winning advantage of West's film over the just-released sequel: It's crazy. West has something on his mind, even if it's this bonkers subtext about Angelina Jolie's vagina. From the outset in Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, however, director Jan de Bont makes it clear he doesn't have the same curiosity about Croft or Jolie: He cheats and gives her the Halle Berry swimsuit introduction and films a stunt double on a jet ski. It may seem a small point, but compare it to the first film's opening, which is intermittently observed from between Jolie's legs as she battles a robot. She squirms on her back, rides the robot, then giggles playfully after taming the beast. It's a fetishistic foreshadowing of Croft searching a tropical garden for the deep canal that would lead her to the Mysterious Triangle of Human Existence.

De Bont is unconcerned with such matters. His sequel sends Lara after a glowing "orb" hidden by Alexander the Great near "the cradle of life" somewhere deep in Africa. The orb provides a map to Pandora's Box, locked inside of which is some sort of super-disease that the Dr. Mengele-type Jonathan Reiss (Ciaran Hinds) needs to kill all humanity, save for "heads of state" and "corporate CEOs" who will rule the Earth. (Reiss never explains how that is supposed to differ from our current state of affairs.) Croft is given a partner to drag along for this one: Terry Sheridan (Gerard Butler), a Scottish traitor found doing pushups from the grated ceiling of his Kazakhstan prison cell. They have some sort of history together; it probably went south after Lara kept dragging out the daddy pictures during intimate moments. Nevertheless, they venture to Hong Kong to stop Reiss — not because he's developing a strain of super-SARS, but because Hong Kong is where you go if you're going to steal John Woo's double-barreled action sequences.

The copying only points out how thrill-less and lifeless de Bont's film is, which is a disappointment. De Bont prepped for his career as a director by working as cinematographer for top-drawer studio directors like John McTiernan, for whom he shot Die Hard and The Hunt for Red October, and Paul Verhoeven, for whom he shot every picture until Showgirls. And, sure enough, de Bont's directoral debut, Speed, is the finest pure action picture since Die Hard — it's an opera of violence, celebrating civilization's efficiency of movement and revealing the only thing that could interrupt it: a madman. Our comfort in the reliability of elevators, buses and subways only compounds the shock when things go awry (a point more potent in a time of Code Orange).

This is about as intellectually satisfying as action movies get, and many at the time considered it a debut of great promise. But if you consider de Bont's later movies, it's no surprise that he has nothing to say about Lara Croft. The stars of his films are always inanimate: buses, tornadoes, cruise ships, haunted houses … one character in Twister says to the leads, "When you used to tell me that you chase tornadoes, deep down I thought it was just a metaphor." Well, it's not, really — not in this movie, and not in any of de Bont's post-Speed films. He has lost any sense for metaphor, and has regressed to the point that his filmmaking is unprofessional. The Cradle of Life is shot and edited in such a way that we always know when we are watching stunt doubles because there's no continuity between the scenes to mislead us. The action scenes themselves are serviceable — there's a clever, prophetic bit with parachutes-cum-gliders — but without developing any ideas about Lara Croft and what she may mean, there's no subtext to them. The best of them is when Croft, needing a quick escape at sea, cuts herself to attract a shark and then punches it in the nose when it approaches, stunning it just long enough to grab its dorsal fin and ride the shark to safety. Croft's detachment about this — cutting herself before she even jumps in the water — is what makes it fascinating, as if it's what she always does if caught without a speedboat. But de Bont never synthesizes that scene into any kind of greater, meaningful observation about the character.

Far more central to de Bont's development than McTiernan is Verhoeven, whose collaboration was so tight that the director brought de Bont with him to Hollywood from the Netherlands. Say what you will about Verhoeven — he might be a masochist, even a full-blown pervert — but at least his movies have ideas. Think especially of his Sharon Stone films: In Total Recall, Stone beat the hell out of Mr. Universe Arnold Schwarzenegger, slipping into a submissive wife character to confuse the beast before knifing those washboard abs. Rather than just expose Arnold's vulnerable crotch, Verhoeven makes a more complete statement of feminine power. In Basic Instinct, where Verhoeven is deconstructing Vertigo, not only does platinum-bunned Stone get to demonstrate her power with an ice pick (as Jimmy Stewart complains in Vertigo, "Why did you have to pick on me?"), but she also gets the scene where she re-crosses her legs to reduce a room of hardened cops to completely submissive buffoons.

And de Bont was responsible for lighting and shooting those very scenes! How can anyone work so intimately with Paul Verhoeven and not come away with some of his sense of aggressive gynomania? First-time screenwriter Dean Georgaris even gives de Bont the goods in The Cradle of Life: He brings up the obvious metaphor by showing how Sheridan can't get over Croft. Did he open Lara's Pandora's Box and infect his soul with an incurable disease? Is her ultimate power over him the fact that, once he "opened" that "box," even a classically hardened type like him can never close the lid on his lust for it?

This could be interesting stuff, but de Bont just has his actors say the lines and move on to the next stunt. Sure, there's plenty of Jolie's cleavage on display, but we never get to see her employ sex as a weapon as she fights a woman's fight in a man's world. This is where a gutsy pervert like Paul Verhoeven is useful. Most straight male artists these days simply can't and won't tackle female sexuality so as to avoid charges of misogyny; it's left to shock-artists like Verhoeven to provide the counterpoint to a Maxim-bred notion of female empowerment. If Verhoeven was given the Tomb Raider franchise, he would realize that I should not only be scared of Angelina's vagina, I should also be self-destructively compelled to possess it for my own. It's this paradox that befuddles man and defines feminine power — the metaphor in the marriage compact that draws a fuller, more complex portrait of the powerful female. Had Verhoeven directed the film, Jolie wouldn't have cut herself; she would have cracked open her vial of Billy Bob's blood to lure the shark in for the rabbit punch.

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)