FILM OF THE WEEK
Tomb Raider
Cert: 12A; Now showing
A law of fiction writing is that characters must act consistently within the rules of their world. Don’t have a vegetarian volunteer to work in an abattoir, that sort of thing.
No one told Tomb Raider. Based on a 1990s video game, it does much in its early stages to make us feel like we’re in the real world yet doesn’t make its characters follow logical lines of behaviour in the rest of the story. Instead, director Roar Uthaug and writers Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons, go for all-out spectacle — some of it impressive — over substance.
Taking over the role of franchise heroine Lara Croft from Angelina Jolie in this reboot is Alicia Vikander, who puts in a physical day at the office.
Her Lara Croft is a kick-boxing London bicycle courier who is, for reasons not entirely clear, refusing to claim the vast inheritance from her missing father’s estate. The only part of his will she does take is a key that grants her access to his secret archaeological research into a mysterious island burial site off Japan. He has left her strict instructions to destroy the research lest it fall into the wrong hands. Which she doesn’t do.
Incredulity rushes at you. Lara lands in Hong Kong and stumbles upon the ship her father hired on his own doomed expedition. The boat’s Chinese captain has flawless US English.
After reluctantly agreeing to the treacherous sea journey to the island, he times their arrival for a midnight hurricane. The boat duly gets dashed against the rocks but our heroine, protected only by the tiniest singlet in screen history, survives. Once on land, private militias, ancient booby traps and falling boulders can’t graze her.
Fun in spots, undeniably, but a mess on the whole.