Review: Tomb Raider

Directed by: Roar Uthaug

Written by: Geneva Robertson-Dworet & Alastair Siddons

Starring: Alicia Vikander, Dominic West, Walton Goggins, Daniel Wu, Kristin Scott Thomas

Rating: [3/5]

Adventure films capture a sense of wonder like no other genre in the way it provides us with a hero and takes them on a journey of discovery both externally and internally. These wide-ranging paths towards seeking what seek allow for the exploration of new worlds and artifacts that will never not have my attention. Tomb Raider takes this genre directly from a renowned video game and despite its staleness in moments, succeeds in crafting an enjoyable feature with a character we can get behind. 

Working as a courier and refusing to accept the inheritance of her father because she believes him to still be alive, Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander) steps in and learns of one final wish her father had for her. This entails burning his research on Himiko, the mythical Queen of Yamatai, which he alludes to if found by the wrong hands could lead to catastrophic events. 

Having attempted to bring this character to the big screen after decades of success in the world of video games, another crack was taken in having Lara Croft get on with her adventures. An attempt that works in both its silliness but also the fairly self-seriousness of its story. A mixture that does not necessarily work well in several moments, but still allows for something working as a whole as we get involved in this adventure with Lara. 

With this version of this character, we see a thrill-seeking young woman who definitely knows how to navigate a bicycle. She gets thrust into this adventure through a sense of honor in trying to pay respect to what his father sought for her to accomplish, which takes her to Hong Kong to the island in question. With this version of Croft, we have someone fairly inexperienced in this world and it shows in the way she navigates this entire endeavor. Each new stunt she needs to pull off in order to survive comes as something new for her and gain experience from in order to achieve her ultimate goal here and what this feature seeks to build as some sort of franchise. She has never been pulled into a situation such as this one. It certainly makes for one of the more powerful moments of the feature where she has to kill one of the faceless henchmen of the big bad guy. 

Not often in these adventure films where the protagonist takes on a bunch of goons do these characters reckon with the fact they kill others for the sake of getting to this discovery. Taking Indiana Jones just shooting a man in the streets in Raiders of the Lost Ark, we see a man very comfortable with just ending someone’s life but when Lara does it it leaves a profound impact on her. She took someone’s life and deals with the ramifications of it, even if fairly briefly, which definitely supersedes what most of the films of this genre typically exhibit. 

While this feature struggles with plenty, the biggest blight on its record rests with the completely unjust waste of Walton Goggins as the central villain of the feature. Getting some of the caliber of Goggins to serve as the villain of any feature should be handled by giving him the freedom to have some fun with this character. Instead, the material he receives demonstrates they could have pulled in any generic villain-looking actor to come in and portray this Mathias Vogel. Such an uninteresting character as a whole, but it only gets made worse when having to subject Goggins to someone so bland where some creative liberties could have allowed him to liberate everything about this man making for a much better viewing experience. 

While definitely having its faults, Tomb Raider maintains a level of quality making it a serviceable adventure film. We receive the opportunity to have Alicia Vikander come to center stage to step into possibly becoming a movie star and she measures up to the role fairly well. She definitely did the necessary work to physically get herself primed up to pass off as someone who could adequately pull off the stunts her character calls for. She leads the line and brings us to this world through this inexperienced adventurer but one we grow to care for and her plight when trying to honor her father’s final wishes.