2018 Film Review: Tomb Raider (2018)

Directed by: Roar Uthaug (awesome name, by the way)
Written by: Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Alastair Siddons, Evan Daugherty
Starring: Alicia Vikander, Dominic West, Walton Goggins
IMDb Link

Not that this is saying much, but Tomb Raider is one of the better video game movies ever made. Maybe in a few years we'll get a good one.

Lara Croft (Vikander), daughter of missing adventurer and business mogul Lord Richard Croft (West), is down on her luck and refuses to accept her father's inheritance on the basis that she still believes him to be alive. After one unfortunate event too many, she accepts her limits and agrees to receive her inheritance, only to receive a piece of information that leads her on an adventure across the world to find her father on an abandoned island said to house the body of an ancient 'queen of death'.

Vikander is compelling as Croft, easily the best part of the movie. She has an effective mix of strength, vulnerability and refusal to show that vulnerability to make a somewhat engaging character, at least at first, and she brings an incredible amount of palpable effort to the role. Despite the fact that there isn't much to the character in the film, she makes the most of it, and always makes the movie watchable.

The movie is played entirely straightforward and bare-bones in terms of plot, with a serious tone, while keeping the action grounded and realistic. There's an appeal to the way the film's approach intentionally tries to impact even the slightest of reveals; there's a greater-than-usual sense of realism attached to supernatural ideas in the film, and it somewhat works as one of the more interesting aspects of the film. Not much is done with this grounding outside of the action and some of the reveals, but it's at least distinctively deliberate design that competently serves its purpose in a few of the places that it matters.

However, aside from a few moments, the film's grounding is simply uninteresting. While Vikander's stunt work and physical performance hold is up as much as possible, there's very little to get out of the film. It's all so frank, with barely a shred of anything else in terms of tone or plot to take away from it, save from an overlong sequence during the first act. In a way it's refreshing, because the film doesn't bog itself down in too much detail, but at the same time it doesn't dwell on any of its characters or existing plot points to really make something of them. 

The Short Version: Tomb Raider is bland but energetic. Its low-key action sequences, iffy dialogue and poor CGI are held up by a strong physical performance from Vikander, and while it never does much with what it has and plays it all by the numbers, it's at least competent at that.

Rating: 5/10

Published March 16th, 2018