Tomb Raider * (2018, Alicia Vikander, Dominic West, Walton Goggins, Daniel Wu, Derek Jacobi, Kristin Scott Thomas, Nick Frost) – Movie Review

Director Roar Uthaug’s Lara Croft videogame franchise reboot Tomb Raider is a nice try, but mostly quite boring, and largely just going through the motions of being exciting. Apart from an ill-judged Nick Frost cameo as a pawnbroker, the dour, one-note movie has no sense of humour, no light and shade.

Alicia Vikander draws the short straw as the woman who plays the video game heroine Lara Croft. Vikander does far too much pointless running about and (surprisingly) screaming, balancing on stupid things and falling into holes and water, and swinging like Tarzan’s daughter from any available rope, vine or ladder.

Vikander looks way too intelligent, clever, as well as poised and calm for these sorts of shenanigans. She is an Oscar winner (for The Danish Girl, 2015) and a posh, proper actress, as well as a great natural Swedish beauty, but then, to be fair, so was her predecessor Angelina Jolie in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) – the Swedish thing aside of course.

Maybe it’s just me, but Jolie seemed to be more Lara Croft than Vikander. I believed her physical strength and toughness much more. I hope Vikander will return to proper work sometime soon. She really is wasted here. But then probably the film would have been worse without her.

And maybe it’s just me, but do we really need a Lara Croft reboot? No we don’t! Not if it’s like this one, anyway. It runs two hours and the screenplay has enough story for a, well, short story, or short film.

Vikander is playing 21, and she looks it, though she actually is 30 on 3 October 2018. Now that’s what I call real acting. You may remember also that Lara is meant to be English, and, after the Los Angeles-born Jolie, along comes Vikander from Gothenburg, with the most peculiar English accent, posh and larky at the same time. It’s not bad, but then it’s not good either. Daisy Ridley would have been perfect but maybe she was busy with Star Wars. With her natural olive skin, and dreamy, staring eyes, Vikander doesn’t look English, though there’s no doubt she looks lovely. And boy can she run! And shoot an arrow!

There’s always a problem getting a movie together that is based on video game. And that is why this movie is so boring, taking the longest possible route to get to its fragment of plot, which, miracle of miracles, is actually about a tomb raider.

Eventually Lara Croft stops running about in London – or rather cycling about – as a bike courier (!), and heads for Hong Kong, where she finds a Chinese bloke (Daniel Wu) who she can talk into taking her on his rust bucket boat to some island with a fabled tomb, which was her missing, presumed dead dad (Dominic West)‘s last-known destination. The duo get shipwrecked on the island, where villains try to kill them. There’s one very slight surprise at this point, and then the heroes fight back to survive the bad guys and the traps laid eons ago in the tomb.

The extended London opening sequences are totally gratuitous and pointless, by the way, just adding running time (literally so as Vikander’s doing some of her trademark running), and offering work to Derek Jacobi, Kristin Scott Thomas, Nick Frost and Jaime Winstone, who look like they’d prefer to be somewhere else.

You’ve got too hand it to Vikander, though. She puts body and soul into it. She’s good value then, even if the film isn’t. Perhaps it’s time for a reboot of Run Lola Run. Vikander would be perfect for it. She’d be a shoo in, or is that a shoe in?

When Tomb Raider opened to a $23 million weekend in North America on 16 to 18 March 2018, it was written off as a box office disappointment, but it opened at number one in China, the world’s second-biggest market. By 2 April 2018 the US box office is only $51,382,574, though the cumulative worldwide gross is $247,782,574. The budget is estimated at $94 million.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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