Movies based off video games have been very popular, but were they great emotional films that make you think? I would say not so much, so they just kind of are what they are. I do not hate them, but I am not going to be first in line to see them, and when you couple that with my feeling of remakes and reboots, you can see this coming: enough is enough! And mixing the two? Uh-oh.
“Tomb Raider” is the new film directed by Roar Uthaug (The Wave, Escape). Starring Alicia Vikander (The Danish Girl, Ex-Machina) as Lara Croft as well as Dominic West (Chicago, The Wire), Walter Goggins (The Shield, The Hateful Eight), Daniel Wu (Warcraft, Geostorm), Kristin Scott Thomas (Four Weddings and a Funeral), Gosford Park), Nick Frost (Hot Fuzz, Shaun Derek Jacobi (Gladiator, Effie Gray), and Hannah John-Kamen (Black Mirror, Killjoys), it takes place as Croft is a young woman living a meager existence after her mother passed away and her father goes missing on an expedition seven years prior. Laura finds out that she can inherit the entire Croft family fortune if she will declare her father legally dead, but she refuses due to because she still has hope that he is alive. After she finds a hidden room with all of her father’s work on a project called “Himiko” that could be the key to his location, she goes on a trek to find her father and bring him home.
There is a lot of CGI, which is to be expected, but through most of the film, it looks good and I did not really notice it paired with great scenery. When it comes to the acting, there are pretty much four characters in this story: Vikander, West, Goggins and Wu, with small supporting roles, like Frost and Thomas. Vikander does well in the lead role, differing her character from the other films (as this is based on the 2013 reboot), but the look, mannerism and attitude fit the film well. The other three do well, including Goggins as the main villain, but he has played those types of roles in the past so I got what I expected from him.
At just under two hours, the flow is well and the plot is fine for an action film, but there are a few scenes where it had action for just the sake of having action that was not needed for the plot overall. Also, a lot of the action is where they try to put you on the edge of your seat, where Lara survives the dangerous situation by escaping in the very last second, kind of like the scenario where the hero is able to get out of the locked car just before it rolls off the cliff, so the suspension of disbelief is high here. This is your normal action film, so I will recommend as a $1 film second run theater showing.