Review: Tomb Raider

“A film of three equal parts… one part good, one part crap, one part borrowed from other movies”

There are times in this film where you feel like muting Junkie XL’s score and instead playing John Williams’ Indiana Jones theme. You can’t really blame the film, as action adventure movies about hidden tombs and booby-traps are kind of linked for my generation with a certain man in a fedora. At times this film feels like Raiders of the Lost Ark, but sadly, it’s also often Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

There’s a good movie in here somewhere. Sadly, that film has been drowned in the requirements of being a Tomb Raider film. The first act of the film is interesting and the character of Lara is very well played by Alicia Vikander. At this point, I found myself very interested in the story of a young woman who had stepped away from her life of privilege after her father had vanished. She struggles with a number of things, not least of all trying to fight and not quite being good enough at it.

The film is based on the 2013 reboot of the video game, however video game movies have a long history of being really bad. What they tried to do here was avoid the issues video game movies suffer from, by removing many of the supernatural elements of the story. However, most aspects of the game the survive still find many of the usual pitfalls and the attempt to set this in a real world setting doesn’t work when you have sudden character changes, such as Lara’s sudden ability to fight trained soldiers after earlier being unable to win a fight in a gym. We also have moments of complete logic fails from characters and the writers seem to have struggled to keep coming up with ideas as the film progressed. The film also struggles to find the tone it wants as well. At times it’s quippy and light, at other times it’s violent and darker than you’d expect. This is film making trying to please everyone.

Fans of the game will probably find lots of references to the game that they enjoy, where as a film goer who hasn’t played the game, much of it comes off as a silly plot point or moment. Early in the story, the movie sets up a reveal for the end. I thought to myself ‘what would be the biggest cliché reveal?’ and then waited for the inevitable and I was not surprised at all when I was right. Sadly, when in doubt this film will scrap the bottom of the cliché barrel.

Visually the film looks good most of the time. Some of the CGI was a bit video game-ish, such as her parachute fall and some of the water in the river. The tomb is surprisingly dull in its design and after lots of discussion about how to get through it, it doesn’t seem particularly difficult.

The highlight of the film was Alicia Vikander. She gives Lara a personality that you want to follow on adventures and is believable in the action scenes. Sadly, she wasn’t given enough story here to really reach the level she deserved.

The film also suffers from the usual issues of franchise building, which of course restricts the plot to fit into a bigger picture. However, its domestic run in the US has been a disaster. The film may get a sequel however as the international box office has been solid, but overall, $255 mil on a $94mil budget means the film has probably broken even at best.

The five bearded questions:

1. Was it worth a cinema trip? Yes

2. Would I See It Again at the Cinema? No

3. Would I buy it on Blu-ray: (only films I really love get bought these days) No 4. Do I Recommend people see it? Would depend on the person.

5. Any cheese/ Disney style bullshit?: (such as jokes wedged in at serious moments, because fun!). At times.