Jolie is gone but film’s still a Lara fun
Alicia Vikander on the mark as star of Tomb Raiders of the Lost Ark
BILL Clinton was US president, Wimbledon FC were in the Premier League and the Gallagher brothers were still moderately comfortable in each other’s company when the Tomb Raider video game first came out.
Its pistol-toting, leather-booted protagonist, Lara Croft, was a very 1996 kind of heroine, boasting a whopping IQ more or less commensurate with her bust measurement.
In 2001 and 2003, she was played in two rather clunky movie adaptations by Angelina Jolie, and that, one might have thought, should have been that.
But no. Here we are in 2018, with Hollywood in greater need than ever of a female role model who takes no nonsense from vindictive male bullies, and Lara has been given a makeover.
This time she is inhabited by Alicia Vikander, who as a Swedish former ballerina — and wife to Kerryman Michael Fassbender — is not an obvious choice to play a pneumatic English heiress, yet seems a perfect fit.
I confess to doubting whether the multiplexes were ready for another Tomb Raider adventure, even one directed by a man whose name might itself have been lifted from a blockbuster fantasy movie, the Norwegian Roar Uthaug. Happily, his film has proved me wrong. Tomb Raider is terrific.
Not every fan of the venerable video game, those we might call Croft originals, will take to this version of Lara, especially as Uthaug seems keen to play down the character’s PlayStation provenance.
But he has crafted an exhilaratingly oldfashioned adventure which arguably owes more to Indiana Jones than to either of the Jolie films. This one is effectively Tomb Raiders Of The Lost Ark, and is none the worse for it.
We first meet Lara fighting in a shabby London gym, but her job as a bicycle courier does not pay enough to fund her kick-boxing sessions. It has, however, taught her reckless courage in the teeth of London’s traffic.
When a £600 prize is dangled, she sets off on her bike at the head of a breakneck ‘fox hunt’, with her as the fox.
Behind her is a pursuing posse of male cyclists. Not for the last time, she gives lots of sweaty chaps the runaround.
Alas, this unlikely film-withina-film — Lara Croft: Hard-up Bike Courier — does not last nearly long enough. Soon she has been reunited with her former legal guardian (Kristin Scott Thomas), who reminds her that she has only to sign a few documents (pushed across a desk by none other than Derek Jacobi) to inherit her archaeologist father’s fabulous fortune.
He, Lord Richard Croft (Dominic West), has been declared dead having been missing for seven years, ever since he went in search of the tomb of a powerful sorceress called Himiko, the first Empress of Japan.
After a bit of nifty riddle-solving, and a video message from her presumed-dead father, Lara takes off for Hong Kong.
She wants to find the sea captain who sailed her dad to the Japanese island where Himiko is entombed, but instead encounters his feckless son Lu (Daniel Wu). Before long, Lu’s fecklessness has been cast into the waves. Unfortunately, during a storm, so has Lara.
She wakes up on the island, captive to a rogue archaeologist by the name of Vogel (Walton Goggins), who is in the pay of a sinister organisation called Trinity. Vogel, too, yearns to find the tomb, but only so he can unleash exactly what Lara wants to suppress, namely Himiko’s terrible curse, which has the potential to wreak havoc on the entire world.
There ensues a lot of running, jumping and shooting, often all at the same time, though Lara’s particular speciality is clinging onto the edge of precipices.
No precipice on this island has an edge to which Lara does not cling, as goodies and baddies alike close in on the whereabouts of the tomb. In an admittedly somewhat derivative way, it’s all jolly exciting.
The word ‘jolly’ is apt, by the
way. Every now and then, writers Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons seem to remember that there needs to be a seam of upper-class Englishness running through the narrative, and chuck in lines such as: ‘What the blazes are you doing here?’
Why the blazes there is no romantic sub-plot, I’m not sure, but there is just the teeniest hint early on that Lara might in fact prefer girls to boys, which would truly make her a heroine for our politically-correct age.
The other missing ingredient is wit. There is a cameo by Nick Frost as a comedy pawnbroker, but it feels forced, almost as if it were written in after a test audience suggested there could be a few more laughs.
Yet none of this really matters. The action is splendidly choreographed, Vikander makes a fine, modern, pared-down Lara, and the conspicuous set-up for a sequel with which the film ends deserves to draw cheers, not groans.
O THERE were neither at the world premiere of Mary Magdalene. Instead, the film was met with respectful applause, which seemed about right. It’s a worthy, restrained, positively pious attempt to tell the story of the woman said to have been the first person to see Christ after his resurrection.
It also buries the myth — stirringly compounded by Anne Bancroft in Franco Zeffirelli’s epic TV drama Jesus Of Nazareth, of blessed memory — that she was a prostitute.
Mary is played, in a suitably enigmatic performance, by Rooney Mara.
Adding his considerable all as Jesus is Joaquin Phoenix, Mara’s real-life partner, which adds a kind of zest to another ancient rumour, that the Nazarene and his disciple were lovers. But there’s no evidence for that in Garth Davis’s film, which is as sensitive as it is colourless.
Jesus is portrayed as the charismatic leader of a protest movement, Mary as a passionate believer, in his thrall.
They make their way to Jerusalem accompanied by a devoted throng (including Chiwetel Ejiofor as Peter, and Tahar Rahim as Judas) and lots of plaintive string music.
The first glimpse of Jerusalem comes a long way in and is actually the first truly cinematic moment in a film which might have been intended as an antidote to Cecil B. DeMille’s extravagant biblical epics, but acts more as a reminder that piety and restraint can be just a little dull.