![]() ![]() Who would have thought Tomb Raider would posit the moral quandary of righteous bloodshed? This is Tomb Raider at its peak, when it’s not just a faithful adaptation but a thoughtful action movie. And for fans, it’s a moment straight from the recent games. While John Wick and John McClane race for the highest body count, Lara Croft ponders the weight of killing one man. In a long, dirty, and score-less sequence, Tomb Raider peaks in a dark subversion of the action genre. Lara’s first kill is also a sight to behold. This struggle works in making you want to root for her, even when she survives harrowing situations that are too clearly shot in green screen. This isn’t a Tomb Raider afraid to get her ass kicked, delivered in equal amounts by the bad guys and by mother nature. In 2018, Lara Croft isn’t superhuman but she is super-capable. The film doesn’t bother explaining how one puzzle, which Lara needs to crack open a gate, is supposed to work, so we’re just watching Lara move shit in quick, boring cuts.īut what Uthaug gets right is presenting a vastly more interesting Lara Croft than Angelina Jolie’s ever was. (Wikipedia check: It’s Mathias.) The “tomb puzzles” are so dumb that the tension in Lara needing to solve them is way undercooked. The villain, played by Walton Goggins, is so plain I can’t remember his name. The things Tomb Raider gets wrong are few, but glaring. Shipwrecked with a rough sea captain, Lu Ren (Daniel Wu), Lara evades a paramilitary group called Trinity - which seem to know more about her father than she does - while attempting to finish her late father’s last work.Īlicia Vikander, ahem, rocks in 'Tomb Raider.' Warner Bros. Forced to finally declare her missing father deceased, Lara stumbles upon a trail that leads her to a dangerous, remote island off the coast of Japan. In Tomb Raider, Lara Croft (Vikander) is the heir to a vast fortune but spends her days making ends meet as a London courier. Unfortunately, the story in between is not so thrilling. This focus on survival that defined the new games make for a thrilling adventure. It mostly works: When Lara jumps out of a derelict plane over a waterfall, you feel the rush. Those games reinvented Lara Croft into a gritty survivalist, an archetype director Roar Uthaug takes after significantly, down to recreating several of the games’ big set-pieces into film. The PlayStation games that nineties kids played are relics compared to the newer, modern titles, like 2013’s Tomb Raider and 2015’s Rise of the Tomb Raider. If your only memories of Tomb Raider is of the exploitative, polygonal avatar from 1996, you’ll be happy to know that Lara Croft has evolved in the last twenty years. But because of the spotty history of video game movies, Tomb Raider is now one of the best video game movies of all time, surpassing a very low bar with some impressive effort. It’s a good movie that suffers just a few problems before ultimately succumbing to the worst video game pitfalls, with less grace than Pitfall. The new Tomb Raider succeeds as a solid popcorn movie buoyed by the magnetic Alicia Vikander, who kicks ass as the reimagined video game icon. It’s finally happened: There is a decent action movie based on a video game. ![]()
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