LARA Croft: Tomb Raider was supposed to be the movie that finally turned an iconic video game into a hit movie. Alas, game over, Lara joins the Super Mario Brothers and Wing Commander in the losers' corner, despite putting her ample bust into the blockbuster.

That is not the fault of athletic action-girl Angelina Jolie, the wild daughter of Hollywood who undertook military-style training to fine-tone her body to muscular definition and donned padding to increase her mantlepiece to outrageous Lara dimensions.

As is the way these days, an English totty role has gone to an American, re-fitted with a posh accent, as Jolie becomes Lady Lara Croft, the aristocratic adventurer who combines James Bond's ruthless streak with Indiana Jones's relish for raiding past treasures.

She pouts those pillow-plump lips; she blows her hair way from her eyes with the drop-dead cool of Clint Eastwood smoking a cheroot; she sends up the male-fantasy nonsense yet she brings a burning intensity to Lara that is just about believable.

Unfortunately, the padding goes beyond the over-sized chest and into the $100 million movie itself. British director Simon West - who made a big and loud impression with Con Air - falls into the trap of making 21st century special effects, visual thrills and exotic locations hold sway over plot flow, character and dialogue.

There is even a Bond-retro opening with a techno nerd (Noah Taylor) and an oh-so-English butler (Chris Barrie, in familiar supercilious mode) overseeing a battle of wills between Lara and a robot on the loose in her stately home: a case of Croft unoriginal.

West's movie has unfulfilled pretensions to fleshing out the human side of the gun-toting, high-kicking heroine: on the one hand, she must do her usual tomb-raiding duties, taking on the devious Manfred Powell (Iain Glen) and the secret Illuminati society by locating the Clock Of Ages that can turn back time; on the other, she is haunted by the mystery disappearance of her archaeologist father, Lord Croft (Jon Voight, incidentally Jolie's own father).

That emotional storyline is hurled about without due care and attention by West, who is always in a rush to set up the next action-movie setpiece, in Cambodia, Iceland or dear old England.

Yet everything is so mechanical, there is never any sense of danger, tension or excitement: a failing shared with last month's Evolution, yet such a strength in the Indiana Jones and early Bond movies. In this Jolie silly entertainment, only Angelina's special bra is uplifting.