No glory without a good story
Lara Croft is back in action but tone problems and a second-rate screenplay doom her quest
Tomb Raider
(out of 4) Starring Alicia Vikander, Dominic West, Walton Goggins, Kristin Scott Thomas and Daniel Wu. Directed by Roar Uthaug. Opens Friday at GTA theatres. 118 minutes. PG
A Tomb Raider reboot in 2018 represents some sort of progress, I suppose.
It’s still a relative rarity to have an action franchise with a female lead, so a restart of one qualifies for unicorn status. And Alicia Vikander’s sleek Lara Croft is out for serious adventure, not gamer fetishizing, although I prefer Angelina Jolie’s smartass take on the videogame character, as seen in the original films from the turn of the millennium.
Still, if the “why” question of this movie passes muster, there’s the more difficult “what” query to consider. Norwegian director Roar Uthaug made a blockbuster on an indie budget with his impressive 2015 disaster thriller The Wave, but he seems unsure of what to do when handed a genuine studio behemoth to play with. Is he going in for serious drama, as the casting of Vikander and supporting star Kristin Scott Thomas suggests? Or is he bent on doing just another liveaction version of a popular game, as castmates Dominic West, Walton Goggins and Daniel Wu imply with their cannedham macho characters?
While Uthaug struggles to find his motivation, scripters Geneva RobertsonDworet and Alastair Siddons simply choose Door No. 2, delivering a weak screenplay that’s laden with verbal and visual clichés and frequently just downright silly.
Did they not learn from last year’s Tom Cruise disaster The Mummy that a plot revolving around reviving an entombed witch is something well short of spellbinding?
Lara Croft needs no introduction by now, but we get one anyway. She’s the scrappy daughter of Lord Richard Croft (West), who somehow managed to become obscenely wealthy as head of his Croft Holdings business empire while at the same time obsessively searching the Far East for ancient crone Queen Himiko, a.k.a. “The Mother of Death,” long buried on a remote island. Daddy Croft apparently left all the mundane moneymaking details to his financial partner (Scott Thomas), who is only too happy to take care of business.
Lara, meanwhile, has chosen to live as a peasant, bombing through the streets of London on her bicycle delivering takeout food. She’s trying to earn cash to pay for the boxing lessons that have helped make her extremely buff, but maybe not quite action-hero buff — she gets whupped by another female pugilist early on. She’s a work in progress, a Lara Croft who gamely struggles and who also feels pain the way a real human would. This makes for interesting viewing — as does a bike chase through London — but soon the patchwork plot insists that she head out on a dangerous quest, in the company of a drunken ship captain (Wu), to locate her M.I.A. daddy.
Factory CG effects kick in with a vengeance, threatening to engulf Lara with de rigueur action scenes of shipwrecks, waterfall dangles and later an absurdly complicated mountain tomb that she’s obliged to not just raid, but also to decipher on the run.
Lara is a brave woman surrounded by bad boys, with Goggins’ mysteriously motivated Mathias Vogel being the baddest of the lot. Following the bidding of an unseen boss he’s tethered to via satellite phone, beady-eyed Vogel is determined to dig up Queen Himiko, even though Daddy Croft has warned it would destroy the world to do so.
Why the reckless behaviour and who’s bossing Vogel? The answers may come in the next Tomb Raider instalment, which this film brazenly sets up as if a sequel is a sure thing.
And maybe it is, although it must be said that while Vikander plays a competent Lara Croft, she’s also a surprisingly joyless one. And if you can’t have fun at a movie like this, what’s the point?