Tomb Raider
Oh, the video game adaptation. It may seem to be doomed from the start, but it’s not, and that’s something that Tomb Raider demonstrates. It isn’t because the movie works, though; it’s because it has its aspects that make for a pleasantly surprising 45 minutes before getting stuck in quicksand and never getting back out. The second attempt at moving this franchise from the living room to the big screen really two films: one swift, crackling, and pretty fun; and the other generic, illogical, and seemingly interminable. Its star is its brightest asset, but one person isn’t enough to sustain a two-hour tentpole.
Based more on the 2013 reboot game than the rest, the film follows Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander), whose father Richard (Dominic West), an esteemed archeologist, went missing and died while on an expedition seven years ago. Now an adult and working as a courier in London, she struggles the make ends meet when she finds a message from her dad documenting his exploits and begging her to destroy his research. However, she decides to take it upon herself to retrace his last known whereabouts in an attempt to understand what led to his demise. Upon landing in East Asia, she teams up with ship captain Lu (Daniel Wu) to get answers while evading a rival organization known as Trinity, led by the chronically shady Mathias (Walton Goggins). Tricks and traps abound for those onscreen, and inconsistent thrills ensue for those watching it.
A lot of movies can feel front-loaded, but this one takes it to another level. There’s a youthfulness and a playfulness that endows almost less than an hour of Tomb Raider and allows it to function as a pleasant surprise. Vikander is not relegated to being eye candy, nor does the script force her into a box of being so self-serious that she becomes an boring protagonist. When the film works, it has a verve and a sense of humor that, while never wholly original, establishes a likable and believable rapport between the heroine and those around her. In the event that the script fails to ground its human center in reality, Vikander elevates the material. She’s a badass, but it isn’t excessive; her failures provide Lara for room to grow given her respectable vulnerability. The direction from Roar Uthaug (The Wave) is never stunning, but it remains competent and brisk enough to invite the viewer to activity rather than passivity.
But again, this only lasts for 45 minutes, leaving another 73 minutes of sepia-smeared shenanigans, and it can’t be due to coincidence that the film flatlines just as it gets to its own heart. Ironically enough, there’s an inverse correlation between entertainment value and the stakes that Lara comes to face, falling back on Indiana Jones pastiche without any real sense of personality. The characters introduced throughout the second half are underdeveloped, not excluding Goggins’s character, who proves to feel like the human embodiment of a hollow threat. Bonds between Lara and those with whom she ostensibly has deep-seated issues are tenuous and instead serve a plot that has always been secondary from the beginning.
What’s striking about Tomb Raider is that it’s unclear to what extent screenwriters Geneva Robertson-Dworet (in her debut) and Alastair Siddons (Trespass Against Us) understand their own intentions. The film spends almost half of its time focusing in on its characters as if it actually wants to excavate empathy from audiences, only to ditch them in favor of mummified set pieces that bleed into one another, making for what feels like a climax of 30 minutes. Structural issues are not only to be attributed to tombs but to the script itself, its pacing further spread unevenly under Uthaug’s direction. When the booby traps start popping up and baddies start flooding in, the experience is entirely boring.
The question as to whether or not the Tomb Raider franchise really needed another adaptation is likely to be answered with a no, but the maddening part is that this latest attempt could have been quite good. It could have been good, that is, if the filmmakers actually made a fleshed-out attempt instead of a half-baked one. It’s Vikander who drags a decomposing corpse of a film to the finish line as the humor and humanity is taken away from her character, and that desensitization makes the end game all the more elusive. As the film unleashes a torrent of false endings, the obligatory sequel setup feels more like a gentle push forward than a shot of adrenaline. It’s a fitting end note for an adventure not worth taking, but let’s not try to press the reset button yet again, please.
About the Author: Matt Cipolla
Writer and film critic for hire who has worked with Kino Lorber Studio Classics, WGN Radio, Bright Wall/Dark Room, RogerEbert.com, The Spool, and more. Firmly believes that ".gif" is pronounced "jiff." 
