You don't need to see Tomb Raider to know what it is like. After months of tantalising viewers with trailers of a buxom Angelina Jolie bounding about in short shorts and long pig tail, guns blazing, swollen lips pouting, you discover there isn't much more to this film than just that: a girl with powerful guns and a lot of whizz bangs.

From the start the filmmakers have a problem. Lara Croft is not a character. She's a franchise. What's more her origins are a shoot-em-up videogame character that relied less on story and more on her improbable assets and the ability to react to the twiddle of a knob.

While other franchise characters are not known for their depth, by comparison they seem vivid. But Bond has Ian Fleming's books to fall back on, Charlie's Angels had the television series, even that sensitive old superhero, Superman, seemed to have a life in the comic books.

With Lara the scriptwriters seem to have little room for manoeuvre. Her character is cardboard.

The story is the usual bunkum. Lara Croft is an aristocratic archaeologist, who on instructions from her dead father, must find two halves of an ancient gold triangle. Croft has but a few hours left as the halves of the triangle must be put together during a planetary alignment that occurs once every 5000 years. The person who holds the triangle at the moment of alignment will then be master of time.

In the meantime, monomaniac Manfred Powell (Iain Glen) has been chosen by a powerful secret society to retrieve the two halves, and the scene is set up for a battle that starts in England then moves to ruined temples of Cambodia and a volcanic crater in Iceland.

From a physical point of view Jolie is dynamite. She is lithe, athletic and anatomically lives up to expectations (although even she needed a special bra to look the part of the pneumatic heroine). She fires two handguns at the same time, John Woo style, and the trademark ponytail, down to the small of her back, is always bouncing around, even when tumbling or swinging from the chandeliers.

Breast-watchers will be pleased to know that the Lara Croft of the film always dresses to please. Even when mushing a husky dog sleigh team through the frozen deserts of Iceland she is inappropriately dressed in a thin body-hugging woollen outfit. No wonder Jolie hated making that part of the film.

But scratch the surface of the Lara character and you don't find much more. The main attempt to connect with her inner life, comes across as unsatisfying and frankly odd. Lara, now an adult, still mourns losing her father while a child. To be exact, she mourns on the 15th of each month (because he disappeared on the 15th!). The film is punctuated with flashbacks to the daddy (played by Jolie's real life father, Jon Voight) who she loved so much, but it's difficult to care.

This is the only time we see Lara get emotional. There is no love interest and she has apparently no sex life. Strange for such a well-endowed young lady. No doubt, the franchise-makers were afraid of alienating a constituency of the Lara fanclub. So they did they conservative thing and kept her sexless.

As for wit, the Lara of the film is too busy kicking ass to even catch breath. Rather than the poised style of say Diana Rigg of the television series The Avengers, she is an American invention, tough and physical. Lara puts her boots on the furniture, walks with a swagger like a catwalk model and keeps an arsenal of guns, sufficient to service a small battalion, tucked away in the basement of her stately pile.

Jolie shortcomings appear when the action subsides. She adopts a posh English accent, but is not confident in her use of nuance. Her idea of aristocratic reserve is to show no emotions at all. An English actor might have got more mileage out of her understated lines.

Lara's sidekicks, Chris Barrie (the hologram in television sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf) who plays Lara's English butler and Noah Taylor as the techie back-up, anoraked, nerdy and grumpy, don't get much scope for bailing the story out. As for Glen, he plays your run-of-the-mill dark and dangerous bad guy, assisted by the mercenary tomb raider Alex (Daniel Craig) and a private militia.

Naturally, the pyrotechnics are large and dramatic, the fight sequences are well done and the special effects are impressive enough, but they don't make up for the shambles of the story and opaqueness of the central character.

Who is Lara Croft? No doubt, that will be addressed in more detail in Tomb Raider 2.