Summary
A video game adaptation that isn’t terrible? Alicia Vikander becomes a new action hero in a film that manages to stay faithful to its source material without being enslaved by it.
Video game adaptations have predominantly sucked. The action fantasy element of most games comes from the ability to “be” the person who leaps into danger, with re-spawning your only punishment for failure. Devoid of interactivity, video game movies fail either in their slavish fidelity or their lack of it. TOMB RAIDER, the third film based on the franchise, may be the first since Resident Evil to find the balance between a kind of faithfulness and audience inclusion.
Taking a broad queue from the 2013 game, written by Rhianna Pratchett and Susan O’Connor, the film version introduces us to Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander) through eclectic pieces of backstory and flashbacks. Following the disappearance of her father (Dominic West), Lara leads a feckless life as a bike courier and would-be mixed martial artist. Having refused her family’s wealth, she is drawn back into the Croft estate upon discovering a puzzle her father left behind.
As with the game that inspired it, the film gathers pace and finds focus when Lara journeys to the lost island of Yamatai. Arriving with the help of ship captain Lu Ren (Daniel Wu), Lara is soon in a battle of wits with rival archeologist Mathias Vogel (Walton Goggins). This serves the dual purpose of providing a dramatic nemesis, and an excuse to raid a tomb via a series of puzzles.
Lifting setups almost directly from the Indiana Jones trilogy and the spiritual brother in Uncharted, the adapted screenplay by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons is deliberately structured around gaming mechanics. Some action sequences are Bourne-ified chases across the docks of Hong Kong. Others are lifted directly from the iconography of the source material, such as Lara leaping from a boat or hanging from a rusted plane over a waterfall.
Yet this approach keeps the plotting on familiar rails as well. When the back half of the film actually finds itself inside a titular tomb, it’s simply a series sequential tricks and traps. After nearly falling to her death at one point, Lara actually exclaims “This is a colour puzzle!” Speaking of puzzles, Derek Jacobi and Kristen Scott Thomas appear in perfunctory supporting roles.
Vikander is natural fit for the role of Croft. Bearing a striking physical resemblance to her gaming counterpart (motion captured and voiced by Camilla Luddington), she also carries all the bearing of Lara Croft. While the script does her a disservice, robbing her of her archeology degree and some sense of agency, Vikander is nevertheless a strong new hero for the 21st century.
As one of the better video game movies of recent memory, if TOMB RAIDER stumbles it’s because it tries to run before it can walk. Like most event films in the last few decades, it desperately wants to be a franchise, wedging universe-building clues into the final act to the detriment of the denouement. There’s still a lot to like, and here’s hoping Vikander gets another shot at the character.
