Review: Tomb Raider ★★☆☆☆
- Published
From a strictly action-hero point of view, Alicia Vikander's 2018 incarnation of Lara Croft is about as similar to Angelina Jolie's 2001 original as Postman Pat is to The Terminator.
While Jolie's gun-toting, high-status Lara opened her movie by annihilating a multi-armed robot while throwing the sort of kung-fu moves that made Bruce Lee look arthritic, Vikander's begins with her working out in the local gym followed by a rather dull catch-me-if-you-can bicycle game around the not-very-mean streets of London.
Which is not to say the 2018 Tomb Raider reboot is worse than version 2.001. That would be nigh on impossible.
It's just a different proposition. Less a high-concept video game reimagined for the big screen, more a Gregory's Girl spin-off with the tiniest hint of Shakespeare's The Tempest.
Today's Lara is in her early 20s, broke and scraping a living in London as a bicycle courier. That's her choice. She could be as rich as Croesus having inherited her father's multi-national business if only she'd sign his death certificate.
But she won't because that would be accepting the unacceptable and acknowledging her dad's demise after he took a mysterious trip seven years earlier, from which he promised to return but didn't.
We know more. We know he had set off on a treacherous journey to the East to find the lost island of Yamiti in the middle of the perilous Devil's Sea, where he hoped to discover the tomb of Himiko, the first queen of Japan who spread "death and destruction with just the touch of her hand".
He, Richard Croft (Dominic West), had to get there first before some malicious baddie (played by a toothy Walton Goggins in this instance) beat him to it and released the dark powers of the "Death Queen" and thereby wreaking havoc on the world.
Honestly, a shaggy dog story has a quicker set-up than this movie.
By the time Vikander's unarmed Lara actually starts to mix it with nasty types in her quest to find her father and Himiko's grave, Angelina Jolie would have pulverised countless people, blown up dozens of cars, crashed numerous motorbikes, and destroyed at least a couple of buildings.
Rule one of an action movie is action. And lots of it. That's the point. You can still have your human-interest sub-plots, but don't let them get in the way of the Action.
Daniel Wu plays Lara Croft's seafaring enabler Lu Ren
Black Panther is the new gold standard in this regard, mixing pop culture comic book mayhem with razor-sharp scriptwriting.
This timid version of Lara Croft actually feels old-fashioned. More like a prequel to the original, a film more akin to an early Indiana Jones from last century than a modern day blockbuster franchise.
Maybe it has been miscast in the action adventure genre? Perhaps this Tomb Raider, with a low-tech, sensitive Lara, belongs in the family drama category.
Any which way, the script isn't great although Alicia Vikander still manages to turn in a decent performance, as does Daniel Wu as her seafaring enabler, Lu Ren.
Dominic West is always a pleasure to watch but he is a little let down by a character who is, shall we say, not the most exciting adventurer ever to set foot on uncharted soil.
Kristen Scott-Thomas and Derek Jacobi make cameo appearances
The cameos from Derek Jacobi and Kristen Scott-Thomas as stewards of the Croft empire are fine as far as they go, which is not very far, but could be seeds planted for further stories should the franchise live beyond this outing.
Whether it does or not will probably be down to how it does at the box office, which is a dangerous place right now with Black Panther still on the prowl…
- Published20 September 2017
- Published7 March 2018
