Film Review - Tomb Raider

Alicia Vikander is the best and possibly only reason to see this movie. I’m not expecting Shakespeare from a film based on a video game, but I am expecting more action than dialogue. I liked the action sequences alright, but I don’t think there were enough of them, and the stuff between them I felt was kind of boring. Still, I did like seeing Alicia Vikander running and jumping and doing action-stuff, so the movie wasn’t a complete loss. I just wouldn’t recommend it.

The film sets out to be an origin story for Lara Croft and a search for her lost father which is bound up in a lame Raiders of the Lost Ark –type race for a powerful magical maguffin. I really don’t mind the predictability of the plot, and there is an argument to be made that these kinds of movies are all about delivering what the audience expects, but I don’t want to put up with long, melodramatic scenes or boring expository speeches. I want to see Lara Croft raiding tombs.

Alicia Vikander does a superb job with what is a pretty poor script and she has a terrific physicality which made the action scenes work despite how run-of-the-mill the staging often was. I didn’t much care for the backstory the film invented for her, either, but I would love to see Vikander play Lara Croft in a better movie that’s all about the adventure. Walton Goggins is fun to watch as villain Mathias Vogel, but that’s because Walton Goggins is fun to watch. Daniel Wu is also really good as Lara’s colleague Lu Ren, again because of a charm that outshines the lame writing.

There is one sequence that did stand out for me, and that is when Lara kills for the first time. I thought it was interesting for an otherwise typical action movie to take a moment and recognize that murder, even of a nameless henchman, is a big deal, and Alicia Vikander plays it really well. Unfortunately, the movie reverts fairly soon after to the usual level of casual murder that action movies are full of, and not all that remarkably staged, either. The scene from the trailer where Lara has to escape a crumbling airplane wreck perched precariously on a waterfall is the highlight of the film.

All-in-all, I didn’t hate the film but I didn’t really like it either. It was boring but highlighted by unexpectedly good performances doing the best they could with a leaden script. I’d say it’s about as good as the Angelina Jolie Lara Croft movies from 15 years ago, which is to say not very.