[available to rent on Vudu, iTunes, Amazon Prime]
Director: Roar Uthaug
Starring: Alicia Vikander, Dominic West, Walton Goggins, Daniel Wu
Many films have pieces that look great individually without getting the pieces quite right as a whole. Maybe there’s a great performance that outshines the script. Maybe the script is fantastic but the talent just isn’t there to execute the dialogue. Sometimes movies can suffer this fate and still be above average or even great. Comparing what a film is lacking and what it does well is a bit tricky. Is Jackie really that good or is Natalie Portman just stealing the show? How good is Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption and how much of that movie’s success is based on a truly great story? The plot of Tomb Raider is unfortunately not as exciting as one might guess.
Tomb Raider tells the tale of Lara Croft (they didn’t mess that part up) looking for her dad. He has gone missing looking for, you guessed it, a tomb. Lara finds his bat cave and decides, against her father’s wishes (left behind in a video tape), to chase him down.
Oh, I should probably mention Lara is a bike courier and, by the looks of it, a parkour expert. This will come in handy later…
She finds a boat and a captain and convinces him with some currency (?) to go to a place that he says means certain death. A storm happens in the open water, boat parkour ensues.
Here’s where things get really interesting. Her dad is still alive (!) and that tomb he was looking for? It’s trying to be raided by a guy who works for a mysterious person on the other end of a telephone. Lara must stop him or the world will…end…I think.
Okay, that’s all for the bad parts of the movie. All the plot. Now to the good stuff.
If ever there was an inspired performance in a bad action movie, Alicia Vikander delivers one here. She has almost nothing to work with and is quite charming throughout.
Walton Goggins plays a fun villain, and while they try to leave his true goals up in the air for the first five or so minutes of his screen time, they just don’t have the skills to write for talent like that.
Perhaps the most impressive part of Tomb Raider were the three or four action sequences that were absolutely nailed. Fun effects that don’t look too cheesy mixed with fun nods to the video game franchise do well here to get you through the slog of a story that just doesn’t work.
It’s not the worse thing I’ve ever seen, but it’s not breaking any video game movie curses either.