Tomb Raider: A video game movie that almost succeeds

Tomb Raider benefits from having a strong performance from Alicia Vikander, but is her presence enough to make it a good movie?

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The video game movie genre has a troubled history leaving behind a trail of misfires including Super Mario Brothers, Street Fighter, and many others. For years, studios have tried to figure out why they never succeed. They seem like surefire hits with brand recognition and tons of material to pull from for adapting into stories. Tomb Raider hopes to be the first attempt at changing the standard, and while it almost succeeds, it still falls short of being a great video game movie.

The film stars Alicia Vikander as Lara Croft, who definitely makes the character her own in this movie. The script takes a huge departure from Angelina Jolie’s version making Lara more of a lost soul in this film. In Jolie’s film, she was much more accomplished as a character and had a James Bond presence in the role. Vikander’s version of Croft is a lot closer to Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins, meaning she is a person coping with the loss of her father, as well as how to handle her family’s fortune.

Her father Richard Croft (Dominic West), went missing years ago, without any explanation, and Lara refuses to believe he might have died. In the early stages of the film, she’s a reckless young adult who is doing everything she can to avoid signing a statement acknowledging her father’s death. By doing so, she will inherit his fortune and business. Without spoiling much, a circumstance forces her to consider signing the papers, and before doing so, a significant clue points in the direction of what happened to her father.

This leads to the latter part of the film, which becomes a mixed bag of an adventure. She finds an unlikely boat captain in a man named Lu Ren– played by Daniel Wu of Into the Badlands. They both set sail to find a mysterious island where her father may have vanished. From this point, the film becomes mostly predictable.

The production did a fine job making some interesting action-adventure moments, but none of it feels compelling the way it should. You never think Lara Croft will not survive, and when she does get into a sticky situation, she survives by convenient plot devices. This also happened in Indiana Jones, but Steven Spielberg had a tongue-in-cheek self-awareness to those movies, that this one lacks.

Alicia Vikander is the MVP of this movie, making herself one of the best video game characters adapted to screen. She really puts herself in the thick of it, with fighting, falling, bleeding, etc. She also has a charm unique to her portrayal of Lara Croft that was completely missing in Jolie’s version. The best part of all is the film does not make her a sex object to lust for.  The camera focuses on her performance and her toughness. This was a much-needed change for the property.

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If I did have a complaint in regards to her character, it would be that I think they could have pushed her further. The film has moments where you can see how this could’ve been a female Die Hard, where the woman gets put through the ringer to survive. Even Walton Goggins has all the trademarks of being a Hans Gruber without the accent. However, once the stunts and fights get to a punishable place for the character, the film slightly holds itself back. It’s like the film could not decide whether it wanted to go full-blown John McClane or be Indiana Jones, which makes the viewer fall somewhere in the middle, and left wanting. The result leaves much to be desired and places the film slightly below being something special.

Regardless, Tomb Raider is enjoyable for all of its faults. As a video game to movie adaptation, it’s one of the most coherent films in the genre to date. As a movie by itself though, it fails to add something fresh in the adventure-fantasy genre that we have not seen before. Alicia Vikander carries the movie extremely well, but she deserved a better script to push her action sensibilities just a bit further. It’s not a bad movie, but if you are looking for a great action-adventure film, you might as well just watch Raiders of the Lost Ark instead.

Tomb Raider is in theaters now.