Lame Lara

The English action heroine has an elite pedigree. From the roguish antics of Margaret Lockwood's Barbara Worth in The Wicked Lady to protofeminists Modesty Blaise and Emma Peel, Brit gels have established a strong reputation for kicking ass with style and wit.

It would be refreshing to report that Lara Croft contributes to this honourable, if limited, legacy; a game girl with the brains, beauty and muscle to best her male counterparts and bring glory to the sisterhood, while still managing to maintain a decent coiffure. Sadly, such is not the case.

Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life is - for those who have been vacationing on Mars for the past three years - the second instalment of the movie of the computer game. The CGI Croft - in her hot pants and thrusting embonpoint with two large pistols strapped to her hips - was every teenage game boy's fantasy babe. The live-action film version starring the undeniably American Angelina Jolie as the quintessentially English Lady Lara Croft, is another matter.

Once on the big screen, Lara is out of the control of sweaty adolescent hands who can make her jump, fight, shoot and generally do battle with all manner of bad guys; the interactive element has gone. They must, perforce, look to the plot, the characterisation and the special effects to replace their hormone-fuelled imaginations.

Spoilsport that she is, Jolie has made drastic alterations to her costume since the first movie, insisting that the traditional Lara gear was demeaning to her sex. Without her hot pants and less of the unzipped cleavage, this screen Lara is rather more demure than they might have wished.

Moreover, there is something woefully wrong with a story line that spends so much time on its heroine practising her moves in the grounds of her stately home: Jolie rides sidesaddle, shooting targets, does a few Kendo moves and so on as if to show off her new skills, but she doesn't actually put them into practice. The best that happens is that she abseils down a skyscraper upside-down, shooting villains en route, and jumps off a tall building wearing a kind of winged suit in which she can drift on air currents.

The story is an anaemic version of Raiders of the Lost Ark, an Indiana Jones

reject bolted on to a James Bond script. During an underwater expedition to loot a golden globe from a submerged Alexandrian temple which contains the key to Pandora's Box, Lara and her pursuing villains comprehensively wreck (assisted by a passing earthquake) the invaluable architectural site.

What signals this action sends to the audience about the conservation of antiquities, I dread to think. Indiana could just about get away with being an archeological mercenary because he was a curator and a teacher - and because it was the 1940s - but the events of this film take place in present day and Croft is little more than an archeological freebooter.

Its position as action/fantasy notwithstanding, I wonder at the irresponsibility of promoting desecration and plunder, particularly after the recent furore surroundingthe destruction of irreplaceable antique artefacts in Iraq.

The globe is stolen from Lara by agents of Dr Jonathan Reiss (Ciaran Hinds) - a Nobel prize-winning scientist gone to the bad, as they do - who wants to locate and harness the infinitely destructive power of Pandora's Box for his own ends. Nothing new there, then.