The good news, though, is that lately the actress has been peeling off more than old tattoos. She seems, in fact, to be making big changes -- both professional and personal -- that are way more than skin-deep. The notorious wild woman famous for sleeping with knives and sharing shocking smooches with her brother at the Academy Awards is now following Audrey Hepburn's example as a U.N. Goodwill Ambassador (not bad for a girl who grew up dreaming of becoming a mortician). She's a single mom, having adopted a 2-year-old Cambodian orphan she's named Maddox (and nicknamed ''Madness''). And she's doing some major reconstruction on her resume as well. For her next role, Jolie will move beyond Lara Croft to an even stronger female character based on much meatier material than a computer-game cartoon: She'll be playing no less a lady than Catherine the Great in Randall Wallace's just-announced period epic Love and Honor.
But before the actress takes over Mother Russia -- and appears in a few other potentially provocative parts, such as a refugee-camp relief worker in October's Beyond Borders, an FBI agent in next spring's Taking Lives, and a 1930s aviatrix in next year's The World of Tomorrow -- she'll have her hands full rebooting Tomb Raider. Because if this sequel doesn't turn out to be the improvement she's promising, it might not just be the critics complaining. It could be Game Over for the whole franchise.
It's got motorcycles, horseback riding, Jet Skis, underwater scenes, upside-down scenes, the petrified forest, Kenya and Wales and Greece, a scene in Hong Kong where they jump from the world's second-highest building and glide over the city on this fantastic wing thing...''
The scene at the moment is in an editing office in London in June, where teams of tired-looking film technicians are scrambling to put the final polish on footage of Jolie paddling around a sunken Greek ruin in a silvery skintight wet suit. And the man speaking -- more like gushing -- is Jan De Bont, the Dutch master famous for making a cow fly in 1996's Twister and turning Keanu Reeves into an action star with 1994's Speed. The miracle he's hoping to pull off with his latest movie: create a Tomb Raider sequel that's just as profitable as the first film but a whole lot more fun to sit through.
Even the makers of the original Raider sound like they did some squirming in their seats. ''The first one did not have a strong story, I'll be the first to admit it,'' concedes Lloyd Levin, a producer on both films. ''We should have made a better movie. But we learned from our mistakes and this new one is a better movie. For starters,'' he offers encouragingly, ''it's got a plot.'' Precisely what that plot involves is, for now, being kept top secret -- something about Pandora's box being real and a race across the world to unlock its terrible ancient powers -- but it doesn't matter. The important thing is Jolie liked it enough to squeeze back into Croft's camouflaged hot pants for another round.
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