Tomb Raider (2018)
IMDB movie Rating : 6.8/10 (as on 25.03.2018)
Lara Croft, the fiercely independent daughter of a missing
adventurer, must push herself beyond her limits when she finds herself on the
island where her father disappeared.
Director: Roar Uthaug
Writers: Geneva Robertson-Dworet (screenplay by), Alastair
Siddons (screenplay by)
Stars: Alicia Vikander, Dominic West, Walton Goggins
PG-13 | 1h 58min | Action, Adventure
IMDB link here
The
ghost of Angelina Jolie past — that mesmerizing dark star, to the screen born —
hangs over the new, suitably titled “Tomb Raider.” A dreary, inept reboot of
the franchise that helped propel Ms. Jolie into global domination (and
pop-culture divinity), it stars the talented, badly misused Swedish actress
Alicia Vikander as the British adventurer Lara Croft. Sexed down and pumped up,
Ms. Vikander certainly looks the role, with flowing hair and a washboard
stomach you could play the blues on. She runs, jumps and leaps into this
yawning void with grim determination.
There
are many ways for a movie to go wrong, and “Tomb Raider” goes wrong in many of
the most obvious: It has a generic story, bad writing, a miscast lead, the
wrong director and no fun. When you first meet Lara Croft, she’s doing the poor
little rich girl thing in London, working as a bike messenger and kick boxing
in her off hours. Her globe-traveling zillionaire father (Dominic West)
disappeared years ago while chasing down a Japanese goddess of death or some
such. Refusing to accept either his death or her inheritance, she ends up
taking her daddy issues to Asia.
Ms.
Vikander barely manages to do the same with Lara, a center who can’t hold. An
appealing performer who popped off the screen as the enigmatic android in “Ex Machina,”
Ms. Vikander never settles comfortably into Lara, whether she’s delivering the
empty, often risible dialogue or running the movie’s endless obstacle course.
She has a trained ballet dancer’s familiar amalgam of silk and steel — the
fluid gestures, the ramrod posture — and she can move beautifully, as she
showed in “Ex Machina.” Here, though, she often seems to be trying too hard; at
times you can almost see her thinking about the marks she needs to hit. You see
the strain, not the play.
And
without play, there’s nothing left but franchise fumes. The first “Tomb Raider”
movies are ridiculous, but they have their minor satisfactions, not least being
Ms. Jolie’s badass superbabe. A video game heroine turned media franchise, Lara
Croft, with her pneumatic breasts and heavy guns, always came off as an
onanistic cartoon for 12-year-old boys. With her amused smile and
self-possession, Ms. Jolie seemed happy to strut around in Lara’s shorts and
big boots, but she also seemed to be there for her own pleasure, which she made
easy for girls (and women) to share. Ms. Vikander doesn’t yet have that kind of
self-possession, but one day might.
No
one person deserves all the credit or blame for an industrial product like
“Tomb Raider”; one place to start griping, though, is with those who signed off
on its script. (The writers are Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons.)
The director Roar Uthaug knows how to work on a sizable scale as he proved in
“The Wave,” an amusing nail-biter about a tsunami that sweeps away a Norwegian
paradise. But he can’t make “Tomb Raider” work on any level or in any location.
At times, he seems to be playing with genre, particularly when Lara hits the
island and begins pinballing from peril to peril, but the action is leaden,
dispirited and finally dispiriting.
The
art of the blockbuster is too rarely acknowledged. It takes a true skill set
and a distinct pop sensibility to turn a large-scale commercial property with
no pretense to art and a great many moving parts into a smoothly enjoyable
diversion. A fat budget can help, but more crucial still is a director who
takes evanescent cinematic pleasures seriously. Jan de Bont, who directed the
2003 “Tomb Raider” sequel (and the first “Speed”) could sometimes hit that sweet
spot; Steven Spielberg always dependably does, and Steven Soderbergh can, when
he feels like it. Of course it helps if a director has something actually to do
beyond rummaging in a boneyard like this.
Read complete review at New york times.
Alicia Vikander Is An A+ Lara Croft In A B- Movie
Scott Mendelson
This
one promises a somewhat grittier and more grounded adventure than the
comparatively campy Jolie flicks. Tracking has the movie pegged at over/under
$25 million, which isn’t great unless it goes bonkers overseas as well.
Alicia
Vikander’s Lara Croft deserves a better movie. The good news is that the
Oscar-winning actress offers an entertaining and occasionally devilish take on
the famed video game heroine, a variation that can stand side-by-side with
Angelina Jolie’s two attempts. The bad news is that the film is explicitly in
“don’t screw it up” mode, offering somewhat generic action heroics and
run-of-the-mill perils. It’s solidly decent, which for a video game movie
qualifies as a miracle, but it gets off to such a strong start that it’s a
little disappointing when it starts going through the motions. This is a
franchise that should have skipped straight to the sequel.
Director
Roar Uthaug offers a variety of somewhat plausible action and “believe your
eyes” adventure. Lara’s big escape sequence is a glorified slinky of increasing
peril that would make Henry Jones Jr. proud, and the film isn’t afraid to get
its “strong, capable female character” get banged up a bit or get her hands
bloody. The picture successfully walks the line between Lara being affected by
the violence she is forced to commit and being patronizingly traumatized by it.
In fact, she enters the movie so fully-formed that it’s a shame that it turns
into one of those movie-length prequels where we must wait for the next chapter
to see Croft as Croft.
Once
the plot kicks into gear, it becomes a somewhat generic affair, with only three
or four characters getting more than a few lines of dialogue. Goggins is fine,
but this “Indiana Jones” deserves her Belloq. Without going into details, the
film gets bogged down by its father/daughter relationship, to the point where I
swear they reuse bits of the Interstellar score during the scenes most likely
to remind you of that Matthew McConaughey/Jessica Chastain sci-fi melodrama.
Tomb Raider plays in the same sandbox as Rogue One or The Legend of Chun-Li,
arguing (as, pet peeve alert, too many movies do) that smart/tough women are
only made as such via their daddy’s influence.
The
action beats and ghoulish traps help the picture end well, even if we sadly end
on a needless epilogue that sets up a long-form arc. That’s especially
disappointing considering that Croft is just the sort of character who would
only need a “Gee, what adventure will we get into this week?” plot for any
given sequel. We don’t need her stopping some overreaching conspiracy, we just
want to see her kicking ass and raiding tombs. One of the reasons I so enjoy
Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (which may be my favorite video game-based
movie) is that it’s just a rock-solid, stand-alone Lara Croft adventure with no
daddy issues to be found.
To
be fair, this Tomb Raider is worlds better than Simon West’s 2001
franchise-starter, which was so cut-to-ribbons and so narratively inefficient
that it killed the franchise even as it made enough money to earn a sequel.
Like the Fantastic Four franchise, which keeps tripping over itself retelling
the same origin story (there’s a reason that Rise of the Silver Surfer is the
best Fantastic Four movie), Tomb Raider makes a case for skipping the origin
and going straight to the “Lara Croft, fully formed” sequel. Vikander “is” Lara
Croft from the opening moments of the movie, but the origin story narrative
doesn’t let her “be” Lara Croft until right before the credits roll
Read complete review at Forbes
Scott
Mendelson fight
without a cause
Space
and setting play an indispensable role in action films, especially when it
comes to Hollywood cinema. In Tomb Raider, Lara Croft finds herself in the
spatial confines of Hong Kong and later on an island off its coast, believed to
be the ancient country of Yamatai. She arrives there in search of her father,
who disappeared under mysterious circumstances while conducting his research on
Himiko, the mythical queen of Yamatai, who is said to have power over death. Of
course, there are the evil men – the antagonists – as you’d have in any action
film, who act as an hindrance in her journey, but in addition, the spatial
setting itself provides for numerous elements of conflict. There are ancient
booby traps, mystical elements beyond human cognisance and challenges of the
wild. It’s quite a treat to see Alicia Vikander as the new Lara Croft navigate
this terrain with stealth, but what the film misses out on is taking this
potent setting beyond the obvious and the clichéd.
Norwegian
filmmaker Roar Uthaug’s Tomb Raider is a reboot of the film series starring
Angelina Jolie, which came out at the dawn of the new millennial. The series
itself was based on a video game of the same name. But at the centre of the
Tomb Raider franchise is the fascinating concept of death and morality derived
from Japanese folklore. But Uthaug’s approach to the mythical tale is rather
heavy-handed with an emphasis on hollow action sequences, making the film
appear purposeless.
There
are Chinese and Japanese characters in the film who lurk in the background and
are never given a voice, barring Lu Ren (Daniel Wu) who helps Lara reach the
island. For a film supposedly exploring a Japanese tale, Tomb Raider reeks of a
Eurocentric and Hollywood-centric approach to characterisation, which stands
out starkly in an “Oriental setting”. It’s disappointing to see the film pander
to all the hackneyed tropes of Hollywood action cinema, when it had moments of
(intentional or unintentional) depth like Lara balancing on a rusty, old
wreckage of a plane at the edge of a waterfall. It’s an image that captures
several contradictions; like that of modernity and wilderness, decay and
freshness, disaster and wanderlust.
Despite
making big bucks, Angelina Jolie’s two-film series are far from being counted
among the memorable action films of Hollywood. The emphasis back then was on
the fights, which Jolie immortalised as Lara Croft. Vikander brings in a
youthful, millennial vibe to the character and the focus sharply – and still –
remains on the action sequences, which is tactfully executed, no doubt. But
this was a second chance for the film to go beyond and set things right in other
departments, but it ends up being a cinematic manifestation of the proverbial
saying – old habits, die hard.
Read complete review at The Hindu
Movie Rating ★★☆☆☆
Heroine for a new generation deserves more than timid
reboot
Jake Wilson
If,
as all signs indicate, Hollywood is entering a new "woke" phase, then
the makers of action-adventure movies have their work cut out for them in the
years ahead. Comic-book adaptations aside, these films mostly derive from the
formulas of 20th-century pulp fiction, which now look far too politically
incorrect to be adopted without drastic revision.
This
difficulty was evident in the recent, feeble efforts to revive Tarzan and The
Mummy, and looms even larger in the latest edition of Tomb Raider, a
"franchise" previously composed of a string of video games and a pair
of early-2000s vehicles for Angelina Jolie.
The
premise of a female Indiana Jones might sound timely, but can a modern heroine
get away with Indy's zest for pilfering antiquities and gunning down people of
colour? The very title – Tomb Raider – conveys a view of cultural appropriation
too breezy to be other than problematic.
For
Norwegian director Roar Uthaug and his team, the solution is timidity: in every
respect, their Tomb Raider is a film that undershoots the mark.
Now
played by Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina), the intrepid Lara Croft is introduced
as a young woman barely out of her teens, although in reality Vikander is 29, a
couple of years older than Jolie was when given the role.
At
its core, the film is a revisionist version of Raiders of the Lost Ark, leaving
you wondering why it was handed to a director whose evident bent is for
TV-style realism.
The
action set-pieces are sporadic and minimise gunplay (the best is the first, a
bloodless bike chase through the streets of London). Exposition is delivered in
static scenes by prestige actors (mainly Kristin Scott-Thomas as Lara's snooty
guardian, with Derek Jacobi turning up briefly as a lawyer). As a rival adventurer,
the sweaty, leering Walton Goggins is clearly bursting to play an 1980s
action-movie villain, but is allowed only the minimum of sadistic flair.
Vikander
successfully conveys the toughness and focus you might expect in, say, a
champion triathlete. But she struggles to endow Lara with iconic force, which
is not altogether her fault, considering how little she has to work with. In
theory there could be benefits to keeping the character life size, but she has
no interesting inner conflicts, and only a faint sense of humour (jokes, in
general, are infrequent, beyond a cameo from Nick Frost as an oafish
pawnbroker).
Even
Lara's longing for her father, her main motivation, doesn't tell us much except
that the two were kindred spirits; perhaps a sequel will shed more light on her
mother, whose long-ago death is hardly more than a plot point. As far as this
story goes, romance and sex don't exist for her, which, regardless of the
script, could never be said of any character played by Jolie.
All
of these choices have been carefully made, presumably with an eye to an
audience of girls significantly younger than the film's Lara.
Uthaug
deserves some credit for steering clear of the usual sexism and racism (only
two tombs are raided, one of them the Croft family vault). The problem is that
he hasn't come up with anything to replace these reflexes, and if the entire
exotic adventure genre is built on an irresponsibility that no longer passes
muster, why bother with a new Tomb Raider at all? Even in changing times, filmmakers
need bigger goals than being inoffensive.
Read complete review at Sydney morning Herald
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