Review: Tomb Raider

Tomb Raider (2018) - Roar Uthaug

       Did you guys ever play video games? Some PS? PS2? Some Game Cube maybe, I dunno, let's get crazy! Well, not to be a dickwad, but I've never played Tomb Raider the video game, and I've also never seen either of those Angelina Jolie Tom Raider movies from the early 2000's. I know she goes to Cambodia in one of them (Oh shit, I just put that together with the fact that she adopted like 600 Cambodian children. Now I'm imagining them on the Tomb Raider 2 set, going to town on the craft services and just making a general mess, because children), and I have also been to Cambodia! That's the closest I've gotten to experiencing a Raiding of the Tomb by Lara Croft. So I went into the new Tomb Raider, starring Alicia Vikander and directed by Roar Uthaug (Hooooow is that a name?) with very little expectations. And in that respect I was...mostly satisfied! Low expectations yield mildly pleasant results (also something every girl I've ever slept with has said)!
       So I'm not sure about before, where Angelina Jolie looked like she was practically Superwoman but in caves, but in this version of Tomb Raider Lara Croft is just a regular girl. A regular, MMA-fighting, parkour biking, genius girl. Her dad died (disappeared?) seven years ago, and instead of dealing with her emotions and taking her place among the Croft business (they're super rich, of course), she's been slumming it, working as a bike courier and having trouble paying her gym fees. That is until she finally decides to admit her father's death, and is given a crypto-puzzle type thing that leads her to discover her dad's (Dominic Cooper, or as he will always be truly known: McNutty from The Wire. Yes I know it's actually McNulty, but Bubbles always calls him McNutty, so McNutty it is!) big secret: He's actually an Indiana Jones-like artifact seeker who's discovered an Ancient Japanese Evil! She's a witch or something? It's not important! Lara decides to follow in her father's footsteps and hopefully discover what happened to him all those years ago.

        So this movie doesn't quite need to exist. I can't imagine that it says or does anything that was criminally lacking in the first Tomb Raider movies. I get the feeling this one is supposed to have more of a "realistic" feel to it, making Lara Croft semi-relatable (She's still ripped AS FUCK, but in the first scene they show her losing a fight with a fellow boxer) and even trying to explain some of the more mystical aspects of the story with science. But this whole movie has a weird, early 2000s feel to it. It's basically the best movie of 2002. Think of The Mummy (Brendon Fraser FTW), or even the later Jurassic Park movie when they started using for CGI effects. It's an adventure flick, complete with Indiana Jones riddles and and even some Hunger Games-like kickass female bow and arrow action. You can even throw some early LOST in there. And while I don't want to only compare this movie to other movies, it's kind of impossible not to. It has a very Hollywood adventure hodge podge to it. It borrows tons and tons of very familiar adventure movie tropes. The main reason it doesn't totally fail is because they've reached from SO MANY different places it doesn't quite feel fresh, but it doesn't feel absolutely boring either.

        However, and this is the movie's biggest issue: A decent amount of it is kind of boring. There are a few pretty good set-pieces (I enjoyed the thoroughly stupid but exciting bike race at the beginning), and I was adequately entertained for most of the runtime, but whenever there were down moments from the action, the movie's flaws start showing. The story is stupidly ridiculous (Why did she actually follow him there? Why are they searching for a tomb by literally blowing up an entire island? How hard is it to find a MASSIVE underground tomb? Isn't there technology for that kind of stuff?) and the screenplay and director (Roar is not a name) aren't quite skilled enough to make the emotions or the characters work. So we have to rely on the action (which ain't terrible) and Vikander's portrayal of Croft to keep the movie afloat.
       And one of the best parts of the movie, luckily, is Alicia Vikander. Hot off her Academy Award win (I've seriously spent the last 14 hours thinking about it, and I truly cannot remember if I ever saw The Danish Girl. It's like it's movie-shaped air. Like, I'm sure I saw it because it won an acting Oscar and I really like Vikander in general because of Ex Machina, but for the goddamn life of me I cannot remember a single thing about that movie. Eddie Redmayne is probably a douchebag in real life) her casting as Lara Croft had to be what finally got this reboot off the ground, and she's pretty great even though there's really not much for her on the page to work with. She's basically a stubborn, heroic, genius, but she imbues the almost-superhuman like Lara with relatability and compassion. And she's legit ripped in it. Her six-pack has a six-pack. But she has such a small frame you almost don't expect her to (even in a fake-ass movie world) be able to hold her own as Lara Croft, but she absolutely does. She's fun and she kicks ass.

       I should mention Walton Goggins is the bad guy in the movie, and he is so incredibly wasted. Walton Goggins is a FANTASTIC actor and he's fantastic because he's such a fucking weirdo. This movie has him playing his stupidly even character so mundanely, so uninterestingly, that I felt cheated. Give me weird Goggins or give me death. Also McNutty as Croft Daddy is pretty silly too. Dude, I love the Wire so much, and I love McNutty, but we gotta face the facts the dude ain't that good an actor.

       The end of the movie obviously sets up a larger universe for Lara to (hopefully for Warner Brothers, who have boondoggled the fuck out of their DC universe thus far and need a win that's not just Wonder Woman) continue exploring and fighting her way through. Some evil group named Trinity is the main foe, and there's a thoroughly unexciting reveal at the end of the movie about who's really in charge. Interestingly enough, however, when it set up the possible sequels and ended, I actually wanted there to be a sequel. I would watch another one of these Alivia Vikander as Lara Croft Tomb Raider movies. Sure that's not the highest praise, but in 2018, among the rampant rubble of reboots, video game adaptations, and endless fucking Star Wars movies, that's actually a pretty big compliment. Maybe the next one can go a little crazier and have more fun. Just keep Vikander there and let her kick all the asses.

Grade: 2.8 out of 5 Japanese AIDS Witches