Movie Review: 'Tomb Raider'

Tomb Raider is one of those doomed video-game properties, destined to elude filmmakers in the way most video-games elude those who wish to turn them into movies. It’s the nature of the video game to elude anyone’s singular vision as what is a video game but a non-singular vision? Sure, the makers have a particular vision and their choices limit those of the players in many ways.

However, part of the excitement of the video game is the ways in which players make the game their own. Your experience of a video-game is a singular vision, only you can be Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and only you can drive where the adventure goes, how far, and how long. Trying to make the singular into the universal is a daunting challenge and one that Hollywood struggles with by its nature as an en masse entertainment.

Watching other people play video games can be desperately boring and any movie adapting a video game has that hurdle to overcome from the very beginning. That Hollywood tends not to give these properties over to visionary directors who might trifle with the limitations of the property is another challenge that keeps movies like Tomb Raider from having much chance of success.

This is the long way of me saying that the makers of the new Tomb Raider movie have achieved a minor miracle: that miracle being a Tomb Raider movie that isn’t terrible. Thanks to the performance of Alicia Vikander and a series of terrific stunts, Tomb Raider manages to be a surprising amount of fun that never once felt like watching someone else play a video game.

This version of Lara Croft is a troubled youth who has eschewed a multi-million dollar family fortune out of fear of declaring her seven years missing father, Lord Richard Croft (Dominic West), dead. Instead, Lara lives on the lower rungs of poverty, working as a bicycle courier while spending time in the gym getting whooped in mixed martial arts sparring matches for fun and training.

After a brush with the law, Lara finally accepts an invitation to accept her millions of dollars in inheritance. However, before she can sign the papers, a gift from her dad leads to a discovery that could lead to his mysterious location, an ancient island off the coast of Japan with a deadly curse about it. Is dad still alive? Lara is determined to find out, even if it requires her talent for tomb raiding.

Tomb Raider as a title is only a marketing ploy, as Lara only raids a single tomb at the very end of the movie. That said, despite the overall lack of tomb raiding, I enjoyed all that built to the tomb raiding thanks to the wonderful Alicia Vikander. For the first time in her young career, the uber-serious Oscar winner seems to be having fun on screen. Watch the mixed martial arts scene; even as she gets whooped, she’s having fun. Then there’s the bike chase which, while it has zero plot relevance, is well staged and entertaining.

The best sequence, however, is the one the producers put out way too much of in the film’s marketing campaign. When Lara is found by bad guys on the mysterious island, she is forced to escape by leaping into a raging river headed toward a deadly waterfall. We’ve seen set pieces like this before in other adventure movies, but I was still wildly entertained by this audacious set piece. Yes, I question the physics and survivability of this scenario, but Vikander’s delivery of an exasperated “really” is so good I could care less about the realism.

Realism is a rather silly standard to begin with here anyway, but it provided a nice baseline for me to gauge how entertaining this set piece was. Tomb Raider is a genuinely silly movie from beginning to end and I am okay with that, as Vikander’s performance and the direction by newcomer Roar Uthang never make any claims for seriousness. Both actress and director have the right vibe for this material, investing it with just enough serious talking for the right plot beats to work.

Tomb Raider is silly fun with Vikander having a great time and co-star/villain Walton Goggins chewing scenery to match. Goggins’ weirdness threatens to make him the new generation Christopher Walken or a low rent Dennis Hopper, depending on which projects he chooses. In Tomb Raider, Goggins appears to be channeling Walken in The Rundown rather than, say, Hopper in Waterworld, and that’s a solid choice with just the right silly vibe.

I did expect Tomb Raider to suck despite Vikander’s obvious talents. I just had no confidence that anyone could make this video game thing work on the big screen. Thankfully, Vikander and the creative team found just the right kooky, serious-not serious vibe to make this silliness work as something other than watching someone else play a video game.

Where Angelina Jolie provided masturbatory fodder against bad CGI, Vikander provides something more tangible and adventurous. Vikander’s Lara is superior not merely because she’s more than just blockbuster eye candy, there is a genuine joy to Vikander’s performance that was lacking in Jolie’s "let’s just get this over with" vibe in the originals. Vikander seems to give a damn about being entertaining and that goes a long way for me in something as slight as Tomb Raider.

In the opening paragraph, I called Tomb Raider a doomed project, and it still is, as no one is ever going to make a "great" movie of the Tomb Raider video game. What we have here is a lovely trifle of an action movie that happens to have been inspired by a popular video game. The trappings of a video game adaptation are there in the Tomb Raider movie, but the movie only succeeds through cinematic touches, strong use of montage, and performance. The video game is still doomed to be unadaptable in the way most, if not all, video games are.