A Lara Croft worth caring about
Tomb Raider 12A cert, 118 min ★★★☆☆ Dir Roar Uthaug Starring Alicia Vikander, Dominic West, Daniel Wu, Walton Goggins, Kristin Scott Thomas, Derek Jacobi
Video game adventuress Lara Croft started out as a figure so absurd, not to mention implausibly proportioned, that she could have been played only by an impervious Angelina Jolie. Of late, the Tomb Raider series has enjoyed a renaissance on consoles, and Lara has thereby evolved into a grittier, more vulnerable and altogether less pointy heroine. It’s this iteration of her that Alicia Vikander now inherits.
The screenwriters have grappled, though not very hard, with the problem of Lara’s backstory. She’s the child of aristocracy and heir to a fortune, after the disappearance of her archaeologist father, Lord Richard (Dominic West), on a quest to Japan some years ago. But how to make her relatable? 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 an east London boxing gym, who spends her spare time haring around Shoreditch doing daredevil stunts for bets.
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 have all the subtlety of the Shard.
A camcorder message from Dad, discovered in the crypt-cave he’d somehow concealed under the family mausoleum, prompts a visit to Hong Kong and a jagged isle where a long-dead Japanese sorceress is supposed to be entombed, and where Richard may also have met his end.
Roar Uthaug, the Norwegian director, brings an almost needlessly solid sense of spatial logistics. When Lara escapes the clutches of treasurehunters and finds herself dangling over a waterfall from the wing of a crashed plane, the imitation-spielberg jeopardy is crisply managed.
Vikander and a doting, wild-haired West don’t get much in the way of humour to work with – that’s a weak spot, generally – but there’s a warmth between them that goes a long way.
Vikander’s action persona is aflush with nervy vitality: when she’s bruised, emotionally or otherwise, she stays bruised. We could hardly be further from Jolie, who seemed indestructible and hardly fussed, barely flinching even at the heinous production design of those two previous Lara Croft films.
More than the sets or spectacle, Vikander pulls you into her picture, as if we’ve bought 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.