Cradle of Life (Movie Review)

Well ... unless you have a thing for Angelina Jolie, don't bother.The plot makes even less sense, belive it or not, than the first movie and while Jolie's co-star breast prosthetics are less visible that doesn't make up for the generally flacid film.I know the movie is based off of a video game and there's real limits on what you can expect but even so, I expect a little more. Even the simple production values such as gunfights and explosons simply weren't particularly good.The plot added supernatural elements very late in the movie and in a very jarring fashion. The only way I can make the last quatre of the movie make attempt at logical sense is to assume it's all a drug induced hallucination, which suits the general tenor of the movie better than the (non)explanation presented in the film.As in the last movie, the timing of the action sequences is *off* - just a little too slow - a little to awkward - a little wrong. It wasn't as jarring in the first movie which had less interpersonal violence but in Cradle of life there are several shotouts and the weird, slow timing really sticks out. Angelina may be doing her own stunts which is a noble thing - but she's not a professional stunt person by any stretch of the imagination. The most animated character in the movie was Jolie's sex object and he's shot dead (in a fairly pointless turn of greed) at the end of the movie. Jolie herself spends a great deal of time posing and not much time acting.Oddly, I find the fact that our 'hero' charcter is nothing more than a greedy theif rather off-putting. She's not an adventuring archiologist - she's someone who breaks into a long lost antiquity and the first thing that comes out of her mouth is'mine'. It's not a very heroic ideal and that matters to me.The growling, snarling shark bugged me too. Sharks don't make noises anything like that. All in all, something that I can't reccomend.