Continuing with the wave of reboots we’ve been getting lately with movies, Lara Croft returns with the latest reboot of the Tomb Raider series.
The most recent take on the popular video game heroine is a more grounded and more realistic version, much like the one we get in the most recent Tomb Raider video games. Lara Croft is played by Alicia Vikander and unlike the extremely wealthy Lara Croft video gamers have become accustomed to, she’s flat broke and not that willing to sign the documents that would grant her her father’s fortune. Her reasoning being is that if she did, she’d have to accept that her father was truly gone.
The story is set in multiple locations across the globe and the action is fast paced, however there were some action scenes that felt as if they were plucked straight from a video game. There’s even a scene that looks and feels exactly like a video game’s tutorial level. Oftentimes, these scenes feel like filler as they seldom take place in an arena where you’d think Lara Croft would be, you know, somewhere raiding tombs.
The supporting cast stands out in this film as we’re joined by Daniel Wu who plays Lu Ren, the son of one of Lara Croft’s father’s colleagues, and Hannah John-Kamen hi is absolutely delightful in this film. Also, Kristin Scott-Thomas is in this movie and if you’re a hardcore Prince fan you’ll know here’s from the critically panned Prince movie Under the Cherry Moon. With Vikander and those in the supporting roles, this was a very enjoyable, grounded action movie. Then by the third act things get weird and the tone of the movie changes to something you wouldn’t see coming at all and once it hits you, things get a little bit crazy and all of a sudden there are zombies.
Like I said, this movie is pretty much enjoyable when you see how grounded they keep the tone and the characters of the movie. However, apparently with the video game lineage Tomb Raider has, at some point someone decided that Lara Croft doing video game stuff in a live action movie was a good idea. It wasn’t. If you’re looking for a good two hours to kill and Black Panther is sold out, check out Tomb Raider, and yes it is that long which is also a problem because some things could’ve been left out. However, for good old mindless entertainment, give it a watch. On my scale of 1-10 I give it a 5.5.
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