Skip to main content

A New Tomb Raider on an Old Adventure


Of all the video games that have gotten the movie adaptation treatment, Tomb Raider has arguably had the most success. The first 2001 action-adventure earned enough for a less-renowned sequel before this reboot was developed with Roar Uthaug as director. This particular film is based on a 2013 reboot of the game that acts as something of an origin story for the franchise’s heroine Lara Croft. Whether or not this is an accurate interpretation of that game, I don’t know; but as a film itself I’d hesitate to call it bad, though I’m not entirely impressed.
Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander) has been living her life on impulse in London, cut off from her family’s vast fortune since the disappearance of her father Richard (Dominic West) five years earlier. After discovering his research into the tomb of Himiko, an ancient Queen of Japanese myth, she decides to embark on a quest to find him.
This movie follows just about every beat you’d expect for an action-adventure, which keeps any suspense to a minimum. The macguffin is a standard ancient power stemming from an artefact that will unleash dread upon the world. What the film may be leaning on is that these formulaic choices and clichés are presented in a very gritty way. Lara Croft is not as skilled as may be expected. For as many times as she overpowers or outmanoeuvres one enemy, some other force gets the drop on her. And while this can be effective in making her more relatable and her adventure more dramatic it doesn’t always work. The rough and dark tonal approach has been done to a lot of properties, to the point audiences are wiser to it now. Tomb Raider may appear more realistic and brutal, but it’s no more interesting. This intent is offset too by the goofier material inherent to the story, especially in its’ last act when it needs to address the mythical element and the actual tomb raiding. On a whole this movie takes itself too seriously and is largely bereft of a sense of fun. This is especially noticeable when the supernatural stuff takes place, the set-pieces borrowed from an Indiana Jones movie begin to appear, and it’s all depicted with graven sincerity. Whatever you may think of that first Tomb Raider movie, it knew to have fun with its subject matter, and had a tongue-in-cheek attitude.
I’m tired of seeing Alicia Vikander in mediocre to bad movies. She really is a great actress, but movies like this don’t show it. She’s decently cast as Lara Croft, seems adept at the physical heft and endurance of the role, and gets some moments of humanity and empowerment, but her character at times is too vapid. Naught but the bare minimum to spur on the story of personality is seen from her; her interest in anthropology and archaeology is only a plot device. Her relationship with her father is well done though, and West is pretty good. His former partner, and this films’ Belloq is played by Walton Goggins, who’s one of the best parts of the movie. And Daniel Wu from Into the Badlands is great as Lara’s captain, even if their friendship isn’t well developed. The movie also features appearances from Kristin Scott Thomas, Sir Derek Jacobi, and a delightful Nick Frost as a pawnbroker. He also sells guns, so I’d like to think he’s just Mike from Spaced twenty years later.
The action scenes range from gritty and immersive, giving off the authentic feel of a video game, to choppy and unfocused. Like a video game many of them go on and feed into each other; such as in one almost ten-minute sequence where everything in Lara’s immediate environment seems to be trying to kill her. And it does replicate the obstacle course and rising degrees of danger present in action games. But they’re not quite as thrilling as in those games. In fairness, even contrived set-ups for challenges in video games can still be thrilling by the mere fact that they’re interactive. Translating that sensation is the elusive objective of all video game movies. Tomb Raider just hasn’t cracked it yet either.
But it still doesn’t have enough substance to it. There’s clearly effort in the decent CG, parts of Vikander’s performance, and the action scenes that are good are really good. And the studio is definitely trying to set this up as another franchise. It’s just too unremarkable to earn it. When I think of that first film, even though I haven’t seen it in years, I remember things; such as the campy tone, some of Angelina Jolie’s stunts, and Iain Glen’s awesome charisma. I can’t see myself, or anyone else, remembering much of this movie years from now.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Strange History of the American Spoof Movie

Parody movies have been around for a lot longer than we tend to think of them. Even from the earliest days of Hollywood there were movies meant to satirize a particular subject or genre. In the silent era, Buster Keaton was responsible for a few. And in the early sound era, almost as soon as the monster pictures took off did you see comic versions of them -Abbott and Costello hosting a few. But parody movies tended to be subtle for most of cinema history, or parody came in conjunction with another goal of the comedy. It really wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that it took off and became popularly understood. And there is perhaps a line to be drawn to the counterculture comedy explosion that began in the 1970s through avenues like  Saturday Night Live , which frequently parodied from even its earliest years popular movies and cultural properties of the time. But that is still a way’s back. To my generation though, ‘parody movie’ is perhaps a less known term than the more blunt ‘s...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Stylish and Charmingly Reinvented David Copperfield

The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account)  is the most important book Charles Dickens ever wrote. It is not the most famous or influential by any means (that would of course be A Christmas Carol ), but it is the book that is the purest expression of the authors’ style, identity, and worldview. It is his most personal work, semi-autobiographical in its story of the chronology from infancy to adulthood of a character who overcomes great loss and hardships to find a fulfilling life as a writer. To read David Copperfield  is to understand Dickens himself. Armando Iannucci knew this when he decided to make a new adaptation of the novel for a twenty-first century audience. He also knew that Dickens adaptations are ubiquitous at this point. Films are a bit rarer, but every few years a new television adaptation rears its head to keep the authors’ unique world an...
Post a Comment
Read more

Notes on the Title Cards of The Lord of the Rings

It might be sacrilege for one who both considers The Lord of the Rings  trilogy to be one of the greatest triumphs of cinema and has been an avid lover of the films since adolescence, to declare that the original theatrical cuts of the films are better than the much beloved extended editions. Easily it’s my most controversial opinion regarding these movies. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the extended editions quite a lot, especially as someone who just enjoys spending time in that universe. They flesh it out more, add extra flavour, and in increasing the length by about an hour really emphasize the epic quality of these films. But I find that the original cuts are generally more cleanly paced, more seamlessly edited, and much more accessible to audiences. All the stuff there is to love about The Lord of the Rings  is there in the original versions, the plethora of new and extended scenes merely add to that for fans. And of those, they fall into three camps for me: 1....
8 comments
Read more