YMMV / Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – The Cradle of Life

• Complete Monster: Jonathan Reiss is a brilliant scientist and Nobel Prize laureate who makes a living designing and selling biological and chemical weapons to wealthy criminals from around the world. When he learns of the existence of Pandora's Box and the plague it carries, he sells the disease to his clients under the pretense that it's merely a highly potent bioweapon, but in reality it will spread across the world, killing anyone without access to the antidote he plans to create and provide only to the wealthiest and most powerful. In his quest to find Pandora's Box Reiss is merciless, even threatening to have a man's children infected with a deadly disease if he doesn't cooperate, and even as he dies he makes one last attempt to grab the Box.
• Contested Sequel: Technically, the film had a warmer reception from critics (still far from good), but barely made any money and a big part of the fandom denies it exists.
• Critical Dissonance: Again, Rotten Tomatoes's critics scored the film with 24% and the audience scored it as 45%, although in this case the fans of the franchise actually agreed with the former camp.
• Fanon Discontinuity: To some Tomb Raider fans, this film never happened.
• Ho Yay: Hillary spends the better part of the movie living in Bryce's trailer. At the end of the film, Lara meets up with the two of them as they are being groomed by a group of tribeswomen. For their wedding. They beat a hasty retreat, but one must wonder what gave the women that impression. It's possible they were being dressed up to marry women in the tribe, but that's sure not the impression you get when you watch it — and if they're running away from being married to women, doesn't that make it even more suspect?
• Mis-blamed: When the film failed at the box office, the execs blamed the turbulent situation the game franchise was facing around the same time, forgetting about the movie's own quality and tonal departure from the previous installment. The main complaints were that The Cradle of Life had very little of the self-aware humor and energy of the first, and that in turn it treated itself just too seriously.
• Retroactive Recognition: The film has a pre-300 Gerard Butler, as well as Mance Rayder.

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