Tomb Raider (2018)

Tomb Raider (2018)

"A Franchise They Should’ve Left Buried"

I was brave enough to catch a late showing of the new ‘Tomb Raider,’ a video game-to-movie franchise that we all hoped was finished and buried. Over the years we have learned Hollywood isn’t afraid to bring back these poorly written action films though, because Lara Croft is a pop culture relic, and that provides distributors safe sales at the box office. The character motive was there but her development wasn’t. The film is full of drama and actually has a decent plot, but in the end I was bored to tears with the rushed narrative. Really bad dialogue led to uninteresting characters. Vikander feels like a step down from Angelina Jolie, who was originally casted in the first two films. Despite having a good crew who at least told the story well visually, the action sequences were pretty tamed.

A movie that was based off the 2013 story, the beginning of the film takes place in east London where Lara Croft lives a quiet life as a bicycle courier. Her life seems to be going nowhere because her father has gone missing for 7 years, but when she uncovers clues to his whereabouts, Croft embarks on her first adventure to unlock the mysterious tomb of Himiko - the “mother of death.”

 "No character really has a story arch except for maybe the dead woman in the tomb"

Now, when Angelina Jolie got the role of Lara Croft, we saw a spitting image of what the game developers envisioned our Tomb Raider to look like — She was a tall-strong brunette with gorgeous features who was a sex icon and the ultimate badass female ‘Indiana Jones’. Alicia Vikander is nothing like our typical Lara Croft in regards to being a badass. We see Vikander’s character getting choked out by another female in a sparring match during the opening 10 minutes, so it is pretty apparent that although our new Lara Croft has some hand-to-hand combat training, she is not a skilled fighter. She isn’t tall and she isn’t strong, but she does have brains, which gives her an interesting edge. It’s actually the only Lara Croft quality she bears. Her intelligence is actually countered with a lot of stupid decisions because she is stubborn and defiant. 

I felt like the movie was trying to give the audience “realistic” take on Lara Croft, stripping her of invincible video game traits, but then they constantly put her in scenarios where she’s just extremely lucky. Her character is way in over her head and somehow she manages to survive every dangerous moment by poor aiming and sheer luck. To make things even more annoying, her character doesn’t really develop much. I like where the plot took the character, but I don’t like how they got there. She continues to just stumble through the story rather than grow. The one thing I enjoyed about this film is that I like how they wanted to make this the story of Lara Croft fulfilling her destiny, becoming the hero we love and adore.

It's good that our lead has this drive to discover what happened to her father as a motive that people can connect with. This makes for good emotional drama — something the first two Tomb Raiders lacked. The idea felt right, but it only took away from the our main character after a certain point. She wasn’t developing throughout the film, which actually turned out to be a problem for most of the main characters. They all lacked so much depth that I had a hard time caring.

Our antagonist, Mathias Gogel (Walton Goggins), plays this henchman like guy and he in search of the ‘Tomb of Himiko’ for Trinity, a secret organization he works for. Gogel has no sense of judgement despite how the story keeps unfolding, which left me with a bland villain with no depth. The one character who I did like was Lara’s partner, Lu Ren (Daniel Wu). He starts out the film as this flawed character with a drinking problem who looks like he could be a great supporting character but then he ends up just as stale as the other supporting antagonists. Overall, no character really had a good story arch except for maybe the dead woman in the tomb. Her story is the the best one told when it was all said and done.

Unfortunately for this movie, not even the action was impressive enough to really get praise. Most action films have something memorable— I remember the opening scene of the first Tomb Raider, where Angelina Jolie goes toe-to-toe with this crazy looking robot. This film really had nothing too memorable but it was all beautiful captured.  The Cinematographer (George Richmond), who also was the DP for the first Kingsmen, really did a good job capturing everything on screen, especially the action sequences. There is a whole bow and arrow scene that translated well with his camera movement, which doesn’t surprise me because the Kingsmen shootouts were fantastic.

"I would still recommend watching this movie...."

The Director, Roar Uthaug, Did a great job as well in making this film flow visually. There were multiple action scenes with fast paced movements that I like, like the bow and arrow scene and a couple of chase scenes in the beginning. Despite having such a lazy script, Uthaug did a great job getting the most out of his actors and telling the story. My only complaint was that majority of the action scenes started out with a lot of promise, but just left me kind of disappointed. I cannot remember one action scene that really blew me away. They were able to pull me in, but then every time I was left unimpressed. It felt like I was playing the first level of a video game on an easy difficulty setting.

There is a lot of potential for this franchise because of how they started, but let’s just hope that the writers really figure out these characters in the sequel. I’m almost sure they’ll have a bigger budget so we might get bigger action scenes. I would still recommend watching this movie because I’m almost certain that the sequel is going to be better all around. I hope they keep the same Director and Cinematographer because they have an eye for these type of films. Overall I would rate this film a 2 out of 5 stars.

Please let me know what you thought of this ‘Tomb Raider’ in the comments below. 

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