*** outta *****

3 outta 5

A remake of the early 2000s Angelia Jolie starring films, and an adaptation of decades of videogames, Tomb Raider is a movie that is fitfully entertaining and too frequently mired down by who-cares exposition.  Still, the strength of the lead actress manages to elevate her slightly written part by sheer star charisma. This is a sturdy adventure movie that may take itself a wee bit too seriously and be cliché ridden but enjoyment is to be had. 

Laura Croft (Alicia Vikander) is the heir to the fortune of her father, Richard (Dominic West) after he has gone missing for years.   She finds out her father was searching for a lost tomb of a legendary evil goddess and Laura travels the world to find him.  With the help of the sailor Lu (Daniel Wu), she finds the lost city being mined by the villainous Vogel (Walter Goggins).  He is close to uncovering the tomb and, even more surprisingly, she finds her father alive.  Richard warns Laura that they need to ensure Vogel never finds the tomb for great evil lurks inside, which is unfortunate because Laura had her father’s notes stolen by Vogel.  Now they need to stop the bad guy from uncovering its secrets.

Vikander works extra hard to make Laura seem likable and where Vikander excels is simply in little line deliveries and a sense of energy.   There’s a bike chase early on that Laura has with her pals to establish how formidable and quick thinking she is but it’s a bit cliché.  However Vikander conveys the bit entirely with an exuberant flair.  Like how Harrison Ford played another adventurer, Vikander knows how to sell impacts, punches, and little moments of sheer panic in the midst of an action scene. 

In a truly spectacular bit, Laura ends up stuck on a waterfall inside a rusted, cracked plane as things keep going worse.  It’s an excellently directed scene as the camera swoops to reveal more of the plane and how close Laura is to falling to her doom, and the final escape is perfect.  The lame part is is she ends up impaled on a random piece of steel but simply grunts and yanks it out, and after some brief medical assistance, she’s back to sprinting towards the finale, none the worse for wear. 

This movie, and indeed the whole Tomb Raider franchise, owes quite a lot to Indiana Jones, more specifically Last Crusade. The biggest lift is a relationship between an adventurer and their father who was obsessed with ancient ruins.  Sometimes it veers a bit too much into directly copying; the fact that Laura loses her dad’s copious notes to the villains is like when Henry Jones Sr. got angry at Indy for losing this Grail diary but not nearly as funny.  The traps in the ancient temple are very much like the climax of Last Crusade and there’s also some bad guy melting that happens, which has become a staple of Indy movies. 

One thing Tomb Raider does rather well is dancing between the line of real world explanations and supernatural.  While Indy movies go fully supernatural by the end this one manages to keep the audience guessing if otherworldly spirits are going to show up.  When things get supernatural in Tomb Raider there’s still a vague real world explanation, which is unlike the Jolie Tomb Raider where statues were coming to life.  The best extended sequence Tomb Raider is, happily, when they actually do some raiding of tombs.  It may take about an hour and 30 minutes to get there but all of the stuff involving ancient artefact plundering is nicely done.   Frankly, in a movie called Tomb Raider there should have been more aside from just an extended finale.  Maybe in a sequel. A sequel which this film shamelessly and annoyingly teases out in its closing seconds, as many wannabe franchises tend to do. 

In the Jolie film they got Jolie’s real life Pops, Jon Voight, and they shared one awkward exposition drop scene.  One thing that Vikander and West do much, much better than Jolie is father/daughter chemistry.  West through most of the film is an disembodied voice dropping needless and dull exposition on top of exposition about what is in the tomb and how it may be cursed and blah blah blah.  But when the two finally meet up, they share a genuinely tender reunion and their final scene together is good. 

Wu as Laura’s temporary sidekick has a decently fun drunken, shotgun swinging introductory sequence and then gets shuffled off to manual labour, kind of like Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.  As Vogel, Goggins entire character motivation is repeatedly stated, he simply wants to go home, but Goggins does a good dead-eyed desperation.  Once again, this is a solid actor elevating a poorly written part. 

Tomb Raider is a slick movie when it wants to be, even though it tends to be a bit of a drag in between action scenes.  This is not a great action film but has pizzazz and pep.  This is almost entirely due to Vikander carrying the film by herself as she makes the experience worthwhile.