By Emilio Frenk.
Director: Roar Uthaug
Cast: Alicia Vikander, Dominic West, Walton Goggins, Daniel Wu, Hannah John-Kamen, Antonio Aekeel, Derek Jacobi, Nick Frost and Kristin Scott Thomas.
Rating: Average
Norwegian director Roar Uthaug, bring “Tomb Raider” a reboot from the films “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” of 2000 and “Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life” from 2003 both starring Angelina Jolie. The thing I start with is that this film does entertain and serves it´s purpose.
The movie centers in Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander) the daughter of explorer Richard Croft (Dominic West) works as a bike courier and one day she gets arrested after she has an encounter with the police.
Later she is convinced by her father´s business partner Ana Miller (Kristin Scott Thomas) to sign for his father estate or she will loose everything. After she accepts the offer, Lara will make the discovery about his father´s research in regards to a tomb that is located in Hong Kong.
She will embark to a journey to Asia and will go to the Island of Yamatai where she will encounter with Mathias Vogel (Walton Goggins) a rival archeologist who wants to get his hands on Richard´s research.
Now Lara will be in a race against time to discover her father´s research before it goes to the wrong hands and mayhem will be loose.
This version of Tomb Raider like I mention does work and entertains, which was the purpose of this kind of films. Another factor that also worked was that it was the most loyal of the videogames version and for people who are fans of the game I do think that they are going to enjoy this film.
The first two Tomb Raider films from the early 2000´s where really bad and honestly I didn´t care for it´s main character. Angelina Jolie is a fantastic actress and I do respect her but she couldn´t bring to much on the table here and also the movies had very bad screenplays.
Here Alicia Vikander did a really good job as Lara Croft. She is very convincing and you feel for her character for the film.
Visually is a film that does work, has very good action sequences and that is also one of the things that makes it entertaining.
Where it really fails and badly like the other two films is story wise. The Screenplay written by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons was weak and had many things that could have been cut.
The excess of flashbacks was the thing that really hurt “Tomb Raider” in screenplay. With one we would have get it and it was very predictable from beginning to end. Also the fact that Lara Croft is in situations that in theory she can get hurt really bad but then she reacts as nothing happens.
Also the film is too long and I think that with a shorter length the film could have had a much better result.
Normally in this kind of films where a bad screenplay is involved I can be very harsh but here the exception is different and this is because the film entertains and Alicia Vikander´s performance.
Walton Goggins is a very good actor but I was not convince of his performance as the villain. He did what he good but I feel that his character could have been written better since for this kind of films you do need a good villain and I didn´t see it here.
I believe that if “Tomb Raider” would have had at least one rewrite it could have been a better film but like I mentioned before the screenplay played a huge part and unfortunately didn´t deliver enough the goods.
With that being said “Tomb Raider” is a movie that if either you are a fan of the videogames or of action films you are going to like this film. If you want to see art this is not the film to see. Still this version is way better than the two films starring Angelina Jolie is better and I did enjoy it as an action film.