Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Tomb Raider returns
Remake an exhausting workout full of plot holes —
Less a film than a two-hour P90X infomercial, Tomb Raider allows us to watch as super-fit Alicia Vikander goes at breakneck pace through her various fitness stations.
Early on, she’s doing a live-action spinning class through the streets of London, and trying her hand at kickboxing in a local gym; later, we watch her conduct Parkour over and under a Chinese harbor, see her focus on core strength, working Pilates while raising herself up and down shards of metal over a giant waterfall.
Then she takes on a massive outdoor climbing wall made of real rock and by the end of her international workout, she’s doing interval sprints down the treacherous hallways of an ancient hidden temple, beating the hell out of her opponents, and taking on a particularly gnarly obstacle course like something out of American Ninja Warrior. It’s exhausting just to watch it.
You’d think, with the eponymous video game dwindling in popularity, this edition of the Lara Croft chronicles, unlike the stilted 2001 version that featured an eternally smug-looking Angelina Jolie battling against time, space and Jon Voight, somehow could maybe ease up on the direct gamer tie-ins and actually make something that breathes a little beyond puzzles and pixels.
Despite the film’s somewhat more promising opening scenes, the film all too quickly descends into plot-challenged CGI chaos, with Lara completing her rigorous workout and lots of other nonsensical things happening all at once. Director Roar Uthaug, a Norwegian filmmaker who made the impressively constructed natural disaster film The Wave a few years back, has given in to the
constraints of the genre and produced a depressingly standard idiotic action flick, more hole than plot.
As our story begins, Lara, the lone daughter of brilliant business tycoon/super- archaeologist Lord Richard Croft (Dominic West), and the only heir to his massive multinational empire, is slumming in London, working as a bike courier for a local restaurant and living in a small, grubby flat.
As her father, who disappeared seven years ago, is finally assumed dead, she is requested by the scaly Ana Miller (Kristin Scott Thomas), her father’s handpicked chief executive officer in his absence, to sign the legal papers finally declaring him so and putting the company in Lara’s hands. Poised to sign, Lara instead gets involved in a Chinese puzzle box handed to her prematurely by her father’s lawyer, and is suddenly off racing to solve the clues that she hopes will eventually lead to him.
This merry chase leads her to the aforementioned harbor in China, where she enlists the aid of Lu Ren (Daniel Wu), the son of the captain her father hired to take him to a hidden island off the coast of Japan where he was convinced an ancient evil goddess of death still lurked. The two make their perilous way to the island, only to discover a group of mercenaries led by the weaselly Mathias Vogel (Walton Goggins) has been stationed there for years, trying to discover the ancient tomb and plunder it on behalf of the evil illuminati group funding their expedition.
Vikander, a talented Swedish actress whose previous credits have included a handful of remarkably good performances — including A Royal Affair, Ex Machina, and, of course, The Danish Girl, a film that won her a best supporting actress Oscar — seems game for the physicality of the role with her diminutive size against much larger opponents adding to the natural sympathy of the character. But the flick is so riddled with plot holes, inconsistencies and faulty continuity, it all seems like a lot of being bounced around, thrashing through rapids, and generally dragged through hell to no particular purpose.
To take but one such gaping logistical anomaly, no character seems to suffer with a catastrophic wound for more than a couple of minutes on this wacky island. In one scene Lu Ren gets clearly shot in
the shoulder — though, in truth, under the circumstances, there is absolutely no reason he wasn’t shot more than once, and in the head, but never mind — the next day, he is miraculously without a scratch. Lara takes a tremendous beating, in which she has a large metal shard stuck in her steely abdomen but, after a decent night’s rest, isn’t physically affected by it in the slightest.
Another? In the beginning of the film, Lara can’t beat an equally skinny sparring partner in a kickboxing gym, but by the time a week or so later she’s on the island, she’s dispatching hardened, highly trained soldiers who outweigh her by 100 pounds with relative ease.
It’s all nonsense, and wasting one’s time expecting such a film to give more than a rudimentary grunt in the direction of logical coherence is a fool’s game, but there’s absolutely nothing in the rest of the film to pay attention to, other than admiring the result of what must have been the particularly grueling fitness regimen Vikander endured to achieve the proper look. Like watching Sly Stallone’s sleek, pumpedup body being put through its paces in Rambo, most of the camera’s attention is devoted to the hypnotic surging
of the hero’s muscles as they climb up a rock face, or pull back an arrow.
Compared to the Angelina Jolie version, I suppose we can see it as some kind of progress that the film asks us not to gawk at the heroine’s body for its curves, but rather its powerful sinews, but the whole thing still feels pretty pointless.