Videogame movies are notoriously difficult to pull off (World of Warcraft, Resident Evil and Assassin’s Creed are three recent high-profile plops) but the Tomb Raider films perhaps come closest to being the exception.
The Angelina Jolie fronted movies from (Christ, this can’t be right) seventeen years ago, are honking garbage, but a watchable breed of honking garbage. They sort of work because the original games consciously cribbed so much from classic adventure movies, namely Indiana Jones, that an adaptation in the opposite direction is tough to get catastrophically wrong.
It’s this fine tradition of copying somebody else’s ideas that keeps the rebooted Tomb Raider from veering too far off course. Alicia Vikander stars as the new Lara Croft, still sexy and badass but further from a teenage boy’s crude doodle of a pair of gun-wielding boobs than she’s ever been. She’s a Hamlet-quoting, kickboxing Deliveroo rider until she stumbles upon a secret clue left behind by her dead archaeologist father (played by sepia-toned Dominic West, who shows up about every three minutes in a maudlin flashback). With that, she’s off to explore a lost and ancient Japanese island to do the very thing from the film’s title, dodging spikes that pop up out of the floor, leaping over pits full of skeletons, kicking bad guys in the teeth and solving elaborate puzzles.
Which all sounds… fine. But there’s literally nothing original in either the plot or the execution, the entire project being so risk-averse that it’s like rewatching something for the twelfth time that you didn’t particularly care for in the first place. Clunky CGI carries a lot of the action sequences, all of which feel crushingly familiar. Vikander makes for a decent Lara Croft, even though her accent sometimes wanders west of Oxford to somewhere in the Irish Sea.
But there’s no lower bar in film than videogames adaptations, and to the film’s credit, this version of Lara Croft vaults it with ease enough to at least ensure a sequel.
