Review of Tomb Raider (2018) by Rick D — 25 Nov 2018

Looked forward to this movie, as Alicia Vikander has been one of my favorite young actresses since Ex Machina. I thought she was terrific in the underrated The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Was hoping for a similar performance in Tomb Raider. And while Vikander was fine, the movie suffers terribly from a lack of coherent direction. The first half hour or so builds well, but then Lara starts her travels and the movie bogs down horribly. I've never seen so many action sequence presented in such a boring fashion.

Thinking about how this happened, I decided that where the first movie started with a video game and created a movie, this time they created the movie with the intent of creating a video game. There are long sequences of Lara jumping around in tombs, above waterfalls, riding city streets, etc., that simply add nothing to the plot. It's as if the film makers needed a lot of action sequences that could then be replicated as part of a video game. I hadn't seen such a thing since the Star Wars prequels.

Ultimately, the story line about the buried witch queen (or whatever exactly was going on there) didn't make enough sense to grab my interest. The father-daughter relationship wasn't bad, but it had the unfortunate task of competing with the prior movie's relationship between Angelina Jolie and her real-life dad, Jon Voight.

I would like to see, if they were to do a sequel, if they could fix the major issues with the plotting. It's just not very well-written. Oh well, at least I can console myself with the fact that there will be more Vikander movies, in one genre or another.