Tomb Raider Review

March has recently become known as early summer in Hollywood as recent years have seen "The Hunger Games," "Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice" and "Beauty and the Beast" celebrate $150+ million opening weekends in March. Hollywood has definitely taken note of this phenomenon as major studios have felt comfortable releasing their big tentpole releases in March. This March hasn't been quite so lucky, though, as "A Wrinkle in Time," "Tomb Raider" and "Pacific Rim Uprising" have all failed to even hit $50 million. There's one final chance with "Ready Player One" opening on Thursday of this week, but that probably won't get too much higher than the three aforementioned films. But the fact that Hollywood tried with all four of these films does support the fact that studios are comfortable opening movies in March, still, as these movies seem like the type of movies that fit the bill for a big summer blockbuster. That said, I've already covered the highly disappointing outing for Disney in "A Wrinkle in Time," so it's time to move onto "Tomb Raider" and hopefully I'll get to "Pacific Rim Uprising" and "Ready Player One" before the week is finished. I'm not expecting much out of these titles. I just want some simple, fun entertainment out of them.

In regards to "Tomb Raider," I'll admit that I was never fully on board with this movie. Instead of being like, "Oh my gosh, we're finally getting another 'Tomb Raider' movie," I was like, "Why are we getting another 'Tomb Raider' movie? Is that something that anyone really asked for?" When the trailer was released, it did nothing for me and thus my question remained the same. Why was this happening? In fact, I was so uninterested in this idea that I put this on the bad section of my 2018 movie preview. The movie looked really bad and the recent history of video game movies suggested that this wasn't going to work out. I mean, if both "Warcraft" and "Assassin's Creed" were disasters, why should a reboot of "Tomb Raider" be the movie to reinvigorate the genre? Can't we just give up and let movies be movies and video games be video games? Transferring video games to the big screen is clearly not a transition that works out well. So yeah, my expectations for "Tomb Raider" were in the basement. And quite honestly I think those extremely low expectations actually helped me enjoy this movie. This is by far no masterpiece and I'll have many complaints to get to, but I walked out feeling decently entertained. Certainly one of the better video game adaptations.

As far as the plot goes, this is where I admit that it's already slightly fuzzy in my head. I saw this movie about a week ago in 2D IMAX for $5 Tuesday, a pretty sweet deal if you ask me. Normally I don't admit in my reviews exactly when I saw the movie in relation to the review. I just stay with the philosophy that I'll get my review out when I get it out and my readers can be patient with my schedule. In this case, though, I feel the information is pertinent because the movie is admittedly very forgettable. It's been only six days, yet I'm already having a hard time recalling the plot. Compare that to something like "Annihilation" where a month has gone past and I haven't been able to get that movie off my mind at all. But in jogging my memory, this version of Lara Croft has been abandoned by her father, who disappeared seven years prior and everyone assumes he is dead. He was a very rich businessman, so the people in charge of the company have been waiting for Lara to sign the deeds and take over her rightful inheritance, but she doesn't really want to as she would rather live on her own, making her own way in life. However, she's about to give in and sign the papers when she is given a clue to her father's whereabouts, resulting in an adventure to a mysterious island.

The first thing that immediately jumped out to me while watching this movie is how committed Alicia Vikander was to this role of Lara Croft and that commitment level alone was enough to keep me interested in her character and the journey she's on. As far as my history with the "Tomb Raider" franchise as a whole, I'll admit that I've never really played the games as I'm not much of a gamer anyways. And I can't even remember if I've seen the two Angelina Jolie movies all the way through. But as the original movie came out when I was 12, I was very well aware of its existence and how my fellow male teenage friends reacted to the movie and to Angelina Jolie. She was a popular celebrity crush, to say the least. That's because she was very sexualized in the movies. I mean, video games targeted at teenage boys often sexualize the female characters, giving them tight clothing or little clothing while having disproportionate body sizes. That's how Lara Croft was in the early games and that's how the early movies were with Angelina Jolie, causing teenage boys around the world to drool all over themselves while watching this hot girl in tight clothing kick butt in some extremely cheesy action flicks that definitely weren't meant to take seriously at all.

I mean, if someone comes up to you claiming they absolutely love the 2001 "Tomb Raider" movie, take note of their gender and do the math in your head to figure out how old they were when it was released. Chances are they were a teenage boy at the time. Thus proving my point. I mean, that movie carries a 5.8 on IMDb and a 20 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, two figures that are significantly lower than the 6.8 and 50 percent that this updated version has at this moment. So it's not like it was praised as a masterpiece. In fact, the general consensus is quite the opposite, that it's a piece of trash. Unless you were a teenage boy when it was released. Thus when it comes to this new one, I was really nervous that they were going to give Alicia Vikander the same treatment and that idea disappointed me because my girl Alicia deserves a lot better. Turns out I was pleasantly surprised as Alicia's Lara Croft is NOT sexualized. She's a normal girl living a normal life, at least initially, and she has a normal female body type with normal female clothes that aren't super tight the whole time. Thus she fits in well to 2018 as a strong female character who can appeal to both genders and a variety of ages, rather than being treated as eye candy for teenage boys.

Given that I've loved Alicia Vikander since 2015 (and I'm happy that I finally learned the correct pronunciation of her first name that she herself revealed in a recent Wired Google autocomplete interview -- uh-liss-ee-uh), as she was great in her triple feature of "Ex Machina," "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." and "The Danish Girl" that year, winning an Oscar for "The Danish Girl," I'm glad that she was given good treatment in this movie. And, as I said, she completely owns this role, proving to be a bonafide action star deserving of even more major roles. If we truly learned our lesson from last year's "Wonder Woman" that female-led superhero movies can make a lot of money, Marvel and DC should give Alicia a good, long look for their next big female-led superhero movies as she'd be great. Being that this movie as a whole has received very mixed reviews, yet I've not heard one complaint about Alicia as everyone loves her in this movie, even if they hate the movie itself, I think that shows that this is more than just me being biased towards an attractive female my age who I've loved in every role I've seen her in. It's impressive to me that she can take a fairly generic movie with generic action sequences and do so well that I actually enjoy the movie as a whole because of it.

But yeah, you'll notice with this review that I've spent the whole time talking about Alicia Vikander and how amazing she is while not really talking much about the movie itself. I didn't know much about the plot going in, even though it apparently closely follows the recent games of which I've never played, but it was really easy to figure out exactly what was going to happen. Her dad was missing and he sent her a letter to burn his research on a particular subject so that it doesn't get into the wrong hands. Of course that means she was going to be disobedient and find where he was and said information was going to get into the wrong hands when she got to the island where he was at. And yeah, that's exactly what happened. Evil dude played by Walter Goggins is evil just for the sake of being evil and he does dumb things that cause conflict and eventually they go tomb raiding on this island, searching for this supernatural mummy thing that was supposed to release a dangerous power that would destroy the world if it got out and of course evil dude didn't believe that, which is going to set up action sequences him, Lara and the rest of the evil stuff in the tomb. If this sounds like a combination of, like, 10 different movies, that's because it is, thus leaving me disappointed.

However, the visual effects in the movie were still pretty good. And seeing it in IMAX made the sound design quite impressive and engaging. Even though I was two steps ahead of the plot the entire time and was not treated to any twists and surprises, I was mildly entertained by the action sequences in the movie. The tomb sequences felt like a poor man's "Indiana Jones," especially reminding me of the finale of "The Last Crusade" when they're in the one tomb-like place searching for the Holy Grail. I laughed at how easy it was for Lara Croft to solve all of the fancy puzzles and riddles that were impossible for everyone else. None of the other actors in this movie struck me as bad, but outside Alicia Vikander, they all felt like they were just there for the paycheck while Alicia was the only one that took her role seriously. There were a lot of sequences where I just wanted to kick back and enjoy myself with a silly, cheesy action flick, but given that the movie took itself super seriously, I had to take it super seriously as well and it doesn't hold up that well. Yet Alicia Vikander does so good that she made me want more as she does one heck of a good job in this. So let's put a good cast and crew around her for the sequel so they can get this right. My grade for this movie is a 7/10.