Tomb Raider story ups its game
Vikander’s portrayal of grittier Lara Croft a far cry from indestructible Angelina Jolie persona
(6) TOMB RAIDER. Director: Roar Uthaug. Starring: Alicia Vikander, Dominic West, Daniel Wu, Walton Goggins, Kristin Scott Thomas, Derek Jacobi. Reviewed by: Tim Robey.
VIDEO game adventuress Lara Croft started out as a figure so absurd, not to mention implausibly proportioned, that she could only have been played by an impervious Angelina Jolie.
We will not speak of those first two films, grisly relics of a bygone era, gathering bone-dust on some Oxfam DVD shelf of the damned near you.
Of late, the Tomb Raider series has enjoyed a renaissance on new-generation consoles, and Lara has evolved into a grittier, more vulnerable and altogether less pointy heroine. It’s this iteration of her that Alicia Vikander now inherits. The rule seems to be, you win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in your mid-20s (as both actresses did) and then it’s Lara time, providing a test of mettle in a brazenly preposterous blockbuster franchise. The screenwriters behind this reboot have grappled, though not super hard, with the problem of Lara’s backstory.
She’s the child of aristocracy and heir to a fortune, following the disappearance of her archaeologist father, Lord Richard (Dominic West), on a quest to Japan some years ago. But how to make her relatable rather than some dreadfully entitled trust-fund creature? Their answer is to render her ultra-cool and disinterested in her father’s legacy, so much so that she’s now a cash-strapped cycle courier in arrears to a London boxing gym, who spends her spare time haring around doing daredevil stunts for bets. Whatever works.
The movie grabs any excuse to show off some sizzle-reel velocity in this prologue, even if its efforts to make Lara a sob-story underdog has little subtlety. A camcorder message from dad, discovered in the nifty, Batman-style crypt-cave he’d somehow concealed under the family mausoleum, prompts a visit to Hong Kong, where Lara is briefly held up by a barney with knife-wielding street thieves.
This is very much the part of the computer game where you learn the controls, as in how to run along a jetty, jump onto a swinging crane arm, or retrieve your backpack by jamming the X button.
It’s colourful, snappily edited and promises a basic good time. From here we’re bound on a trawler for some jagged isle where a long-dead, rumoured-to-be-terrifying Japanese sorceress is supposed to be entombed, and where Richard may also have met his end.
Roar Uthaug, a Norwegian commercials whiz whose name demands a Viking helmet more obviously than a director’s chair, brings to this assignment an almost needlessly solid sense of spatial logistics. When Lara escapes the clutches of treasure-hunters and finds herself dangling over a waterfall from the wing of a crashed plane, the imitation-Spielberg jeopardy is crisply managed.
Less so, a section where Lara has to plug some stained-glass bricks into a circular door mechanism. But even the film’s weaker set-pieces are pleasingly stupid, and it has the crucial advantage of likeability over its predecessors.
If shamelessly plundering from dingy old graves is still the name of the game, the most obvious instance is Lara’s relationship with her dad, daylight-robbery homage to Indys Junior and Senior from The Last Crusade.
Vikander’s action persona is aflush with nervy vitality: when she’s bruised, emotionally or otherwise, she stays bruised.
We could hardly be farther from Jolie, who seemed indestructible and hardly fussed. More than the sets or spectacle, Vikander pulls you into her picture, as if we’ve signed up for a special edition of the game where Lara Croft has only one life to spare; one go to get it right. It’s not rocket science, just an elementary way to make us sit up and care. – The Telegraph