Tomb Raider lacks punch in relaunch

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This article was published 16/03/2018 (3119 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If ever a movie was ripe to take advantage of momentum, it was Tomb Raider.

We’re talking about the physical going-forward momentum of a movie based on a classic running/jumping/shooting video game. (Debuting in 1996, Tomb Raider’s heroine Lara Croft was the teen-boy-gamer’s original pistol-packin’ mama, doing all the daring stunts of masculine video game heroes with the handicap of breasts that resembled emergency flotation devices.)

But it’s also about the momentum that accompanied last year’s Wonder Woman, wherein a female superheroine smashed through the glass ceiling of femme-centric superhero action. Alas, that advantage is pretty much blown out of the water before Alicia Vikander’s new iteration of Lara puts a score on the board.

Norwegian director Roar Uthaug helms a rebooted vision of Lara Croft that strives to de-mythologize her, even stripping her of her matching Heckler & Koch pistols. Gone too is the overt sexuality and danger Angeline Jolie brought to the role in her 2001 and 2003 films, which weren’t especially good, but which now evoke wistful nostalgia compared to this.

It was not a bad idea to cast Swedish Oscar-winner Vikander in the role, mind you. In contrast to the calculating android she played in Ex Machina, Vikander here strives to humanize Lara, making her a hip, contemporary gal, practising mixed martial arts when she’s not working as a bicycle messenger to pay the bills.

Ah yes, this Lara is still an heiress to the Croft fortune bequeathed to her by her father Lord Richard Croft (Dominic West), a widowed adventurer who left his daughter alone seven years earlier to pursue a mythical Japanese demoness, and hasn’t been seen since.

Instead of enjoying the fruits of her inheritance, she refuses to admit her father is dead. So when she finds a secret room in the family crypt that points the way to a hidden island off Japan, she takes off to find her father, hiring handsome drunkard Lu Ren (Daniel Wu) in Hong Kong to pilot a boat to the mystery island.

It is here they meet Mathias Vogel (Walton Goggins), an evil mercenary who has spent years trying to uncover the secret location Lord Croft evidently took to his grave.

Uthaug (The Wave, Cold Prey) has a noble enough idea to add a layer of real-world patina to an escapist franchise. The main embellishment here is that this Lara has human emotions. If she is wounded, or if she kills a bad guy, she will actually express some distress about it.

But the movie sorely lacks the brisk pace — momentum — this kind of adventure needs. It putters around endlessly before a tomb gets… you know… raided. And for some reason, sexual tension was evidently deemed off-limits between Lu Ren and Lara despite the potential African Queen dynamic of their relationship.

The main relationship is between Lara and her father, and that gets a little icky after a while.

As for Goggins’ character, they might as well have cast a CG orc in the role. Matthias is just a two-dimensional thug, well beneath the skill set Goggins demonstrated playing his celebrated heavy in the TV series Justified. If a movie can only be as good as its villain, this movie was in trouble from the get-go.

Want excitement and suspense? There’s more of that in the first seven minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark than there is in the entirety of this movie.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing