The movies themselves were terrible, but as a snapshot of the period’s pop culture, Jolie in Croft’s athletic outfits bordered on iconic.īy contrast, the only thing about the new Tomb Raider with any pizzazz is the name of its director: Roar Uthaug. Gamers have their own relationship to the character, but those who aren’t in the fold, if they think about her at all, hear the name “Lara Croft” and instantly conjure up Angelina Jolie at her most adventuresome and buoyant, playing a more agile, puzzle-solving, female answer to Indiana Jones. (The Resident Evil films blow it out of the water worldwide, as does, Lord help us, The Angry Birds Movie.) But its 2003 sequel, the perplexingly named Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, was an underperformer. ![]() Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, released in 2001, is still the video-game movie adaptation with the largest gross in domestic history. ![]() The film strains credulity even for a vid-game fantasy by letting the leading lady recover awfully quickly from bad injuries, but other than that Vikander commands attention and is the element here that makes Tomb Raider sort of watchable.Behold Alicia Vikander, leaping, swinging, and flexing her way through Tomb Raider-a franchise resurrected not because there was consumer demand, but because it is a brand name everyone recognizes. Slim and not tall, she doesn’t cut the figure of a muscled powerhouse, but here she fully embodies physical tenacity and grit, along with absolute determination not to give in or up. When all the one-dimensional supporting characters and familiar action moves fall by the wayside, the one thing left standing is Vikander. (For the record, the 2001 Lara Croft: Tomb Raider pulled in $274.7 million worldwide, while the dreadful 2003 sequel, Lara Croft: The Cradle of Life, fell off dramatically with a $156.5 million global take, making quick work of the franchise’s first incarnation.) Most assured of all, of course, is the safe return of Lara to London, where a sequel will no doubt start if box-office returns for this one warrant it. Here, of course, it’s all entirely fixed and laid out and entirely predictable, with unsurprising fates awaiting all the central characters. This disagreement triggers a final act of videogame-like action inside an extensive cave complex with numerous moving parts, the sort of thing gamers take great pleasure in negotiating. The comic book-worthy dilemma is that Vogel, sensing vast riches and untold powers, is determined to open up the tomb of the evil Queen Himiko, who was buried alive therein 2,000 years before, whereas Croft is convinced that only disaster will result from her disinterment. The script by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastir Siddons is very much a connect-the-dots affair, unburdened by the need for subtlety, subtext or deep characterization - how many times we hear the father go all soft and call his daughter by her pet name “Sprout” cannot be tabulated. ![]() But after a pacy early scene in which courier Lara leads a wild bike chase through East London, the action reverts to the tried-and-true as the narrative focuses once again on tomb raiding, ruthless mercenaries, mad races through the jungle, much hanging from precipices, secret chambers being penetrated and dormant curses being unleashed after two thousand years. Spurred by the successful videogame reboot in 2013, the revival of the brand’s big-screen profile offered the opportunity to sharpen the reborn franchise’s edge, a notion encouraged by the recruitment of Norwegian director Roar Uthang ( The Wave). Brandishing impressively packed abs and enough upper body strength to pull herself out of countless jams, Alicia Vikander gamely steps into the kick-ass role twice played by Angelina Jolie, but the derivative story and cardboard supporting characters are straight out of 1930s movie serials. It’s a new package for old goods in Tomb Raider, a grimly determined by-the-numbers rehash of the same sort of plots and action moves that animated the first two Lara Croft films back in the early 2000s.
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