Tomb Raider

Tomb Raider

Starring Alicia Vikander, Dominic West, Walton Goggins, Daniel Wu

Directed by Roar Uthaug

The Story:
Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander) is a scrappy delivery woman who frequents the boxing ring as well as getting involved in high-speed bike races, running away from her family heritage and her father Richard Croft (Dominic West), who disappeared seven years earlier.

After an accident involving a police car, Lara finally beings to accept her role as the beneficiary of the Croft organization, and after uncovering a clue from her father, learns that he was much more than a businessman - he was an archaeologist, who was investigating the mysterious tomb of Himiko - a Japanese queen who supposedly held the power of life and death.  Lara tracks down the island where the tomb is, and finds Mathias Vogel (Walton Goggins), a fellow archaeologist who desires the corpse of Himiko for the mysterious organization known as Trinity.  Lara hopes to find if her father is still alive, and stop Vogel from unleashing a deadly entity on the world.

The Synopsis:
Video game to film adaptations are easily the most difficult to achieve, mostly due to the outlandish source material and trying to make it more contemporary for the big screen.  There hasn't really been a great video game movie ("Resident Evil" got it closest in my opinion), and this isn't the first time the 22-year-old franchise has been brought to the big screen.  Angelina Jolie starred as Lara Croft in two Tomb Raider movies, and although both were lucrative, they weren't very good, mostly due to the presentation of Croft as a woman with no faults, no fears, and basically superhuman abilities.  Not to mention the incredibly silly breast implants that objectified Croft as more a sex symbol than action hero.

Oscar-winner Alicia Vikander picked up the Lara Croft mantle, and thankfully she delivered a performance that was equal parts unrelenting and humanistic, delivering a solid performance in a film that isn't over-the-top like other video game films, and has now become my personal favorite video game film.

Based off the 2013 reboot video game, Lara Croft here isn't the seasoned adventurer and tomb raider that we know her as, but instead she's an average woman who's headstrong and fierce, but also severely hurt by her father's disappearance seven years ago.  The two were close as she grew up, and she doesn't understand why he would just leave her without warning.  We see Vikander perform using both ends of the stick here, as one moment she's a fierce warrior who's flinging arrows like Katniss Everdeen, and the next she's getting teary-eyed and emotional over a family dynamic.  She's surely not a superhero like Jolie portrayed her (not to mention no implants, thankfully), and she's not a seasoned fighter.

I don't watch much sports, but I remember seeing a tennis match with Venus Williams where she met each hit with a loud grunt, and I was impressed because she was obviously putting her whole self into the game.  Here, when Lara encounters difficulties (such as getting her behind handed to her by another fighter, getting flung into a wall, or the myriad of other methods she hurts herself), she lets out a painful grunt or scream, and we see that she is indeed just a woman, not a superhero that is invulnerable.   Still, despite the fact that she often gets beaten up, she never gives up, and you can see the fierce determination in her eyes that proves she will never surrender or give in, and she also emotes sadness and pain in equal measure. 

While the story itself is rather simple and predictable, the performances are what drives the movie.  Apart from Vikander's stellar lead, Walton Goggins gives a deeper character in Vogel than just another bad guy who's bad just for the sake of being bad, and also gives him a backstory that ties him emotionally with Vikander's Lara.  He's not the mastermind behind Trinity, but merely an employee who's spent seven years on an island looking for a tomb, while his own children grow up without him, much like what Lara went through without having her father around.  Dominic West also gives a great performance as Croft's father, who's equal parts doting dad and adventurer, but it's Vikander who rises above the rest and shows how she grows up - from worshiping her father to eventually surpassing him - that's a revelation to see, and what sets the film apart from other video game films: there's an actual story to it.

The Summary:
Surpassing beyond the traditional video game movies, "Tomb Raider" is aided by an amazing Vikander, an emotional underlying story, and shows it's not afraid to depict its titular hero as human.

The Score: A