Yahoo News Tomb Raider review: How Lara Croft ruins her own movie
At the start of Tomb Raider we find Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander) living in London and working as a bike courier. Despite being the heiress to a vast fortune left by her missing-presumed-dead father and owning an enormous mansion, Lara refuses to accept her inheritance and instead attempts to make a quick buck engaging in an elaborate urban bike-chase game.
This involves hurtling through the streets trailing a can of paint, knocking over pedestrians, holding up traffic, causing injury to another cyclist, nearly running over a cabbie and eventually crashing into a police car.
But, ha ha! Who cares? Certainly not Lara, who's set up at the start and maintained throughout the entire film as an arrogant, selfish, entitled A-hole. It's a major stumbling block in a movie which is already tainted by the bad rep that video-game movies have.
Yep, Lara Croft is actually the worst thing about her own movie.
While the action sequences in Tomb Raider are gritty and frantic, and Vikander gives a very credible rough-and-tumble performance, Norwegian director Roar Uthaug's reboot is cold, humourless and heartless. It plays out as a grim, boring, knock off of Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade with more punching, and it makes some very weird choices along the way.
Back to the plot: inspired by a mysterious puzzle box Lara follows her father's (Dominic West) clues to a secret cellar containing years' worth of research into the ancient Eastern myth of Himiko, Queen of Death, whose hidden resting place is said to be somewhere on a deserted island.
Flogging a bit of stone on a string to the most implausible pawn shop in the world (for £8,000 cash, no questions asked), Lara sets off for Hong Kong. There she tracks down her father's contact Lu Ren (Daniel Wu), hires his boat with him as the captain, destroys it and almost kills him. And that's just the first act.
Finally on the fabled island, the main Tomb Raider-ing kicks in. Vikander – who's already put her name down for a sequel – at her best being put through the mill: almost drowning in white-water rapids, hanging off the edge of the wreckage of a plane and scrapping tooth and nail with a series of bad guys and henchmen.
And they are ALL men. Aside from the London scenes at the start and end there are no other women in Tomb Raider at all – a fact which Vikander herself has acknowledged as being 'disappointing'. Yes, it just about passes the Bechdel test, and Croft's outfits are practical rather than revealing, but it really isn't as feminist as it thinks it is. Instead Croft is a character who almost seems to reject her gender.
Growing up without a mother and aspiring to qualities prized by her absentee father (who would frequently abandon the young Lara), she's resourceful, tough, a good marksman and a skilled fighter. Openly snubbing the only mother figure in her life (played by Kristen Scott Thomas), she's also cold, selfish, charmless and lacking in compassion.
Had the movie opted to explore the effects of her all-male upbringing it could have been a whole lot more interesting. After all, most of the film takes place on an island populated entirely by men, most of whom are over 40 – it is literally an entire island of warped father figures. But this really isn't that movie.
At just under two hours Tomb Raider isn't long for a blockbuster but the clunky, exposition-heavy dialogue, flimsy characterisation and lack of any real peril means even this modest run time drags. Fans of the rebooted game might get a kick out of the gritty style, visceral action and Vikander's physical performance but as for breaking the curse of the video-game movie – that's one code that still hasn't been cracked.
Tomb Raider is in cinemas on March 16 in the UK and US.
Director: Roar Uthaug; Screenplay: Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Alastair Siddons; Starring: Alicia Vikander, Dominic West, Walton Goggins, Kristen Scott Thomas, Daniel Wu; Derek Jacobi Running time:118 minutes; Certificate: 12A
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