![]() ![]() By the time they make it to the titular tomb, I’m barely invested in Lara because she honestly doesn’t do anything. Instead, the second act of the film comes to the slowest of crawls as Lara bums around from sight to sight – either running from Vogel or avoiding some series of obstacles, much like the newest Tomb Raider installment. So now we have our antagonist, whose only apparent motivation seems to be that he works for this shadowy company that is “everywhere.” We don’t learn a lot about Trinity, the organization apparently pulling the strings even before Lara’s father’s disappearance, but this conspiratorial slant is certainly the most interesting part of the movie and it is barely addressed. Much like a King Kong retelling, Lara finds herself on this abandoned Skull Island-type mass of land where she meets Mathias Vogel ( Walton Goggins ), who is investigating whatever Lara’s father was investigating. It’s a decent attempt at giving Lara motivation to drop everything in her life to search for her father, and it is a step in the right direction for video game movies, making it more investigative than action-packed. Her father disappeared only seven years ago (the movie takes place in 2018 so the fact that 2011 is considered ‘the past’ makes my stomach churn) and she stumbles upon a recording that halfheartedly explains that Lara’s father is an archeologist who went looking for… something. ![]() The movie sets up Lara’s motivations with a background story about her father leaving to investigate some world mystery and essentially going missing and presumed dead. There’s no denying that the new Tomb Raider games take themselves more seriously than their forebearers, and Alicia Vikander’s casting certainly adds weight to that direction – she looks just like the new Lara Croft mold (skinny/jacked/petite white girl). Tomb Raider (2018) is certainly a departure from the canon of Playstation 1’s Lara Croft adventures and falls more in line with the PS3 reboot of the series. Now, a decade later, Alicia Vikander takes the Lara Croft mantle and jumps into the action for a video game adaptation/reboot that starts off on the right foot… only to completely drop the ball in the second half of the film and forget that this is still a movie, despite the source material. The sequel made $100 million less, but that also doesn’t exactly come as a surprise. Considering Tomb Raider was one of the leading franchises in late-90s/early-2000s video gaming – with a female protagonist leading the charge no less – it came as no surprise that a studio would take advantage and cast Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft in the original, relatively faithful adaptation of the series that grossed over $200 million. Maybe a few of the Resident Evil adaptations are entertaining (there are six of them now?), and there’s a cult fandom for Mortal Kombat (1995), but for the most part (about 99%), films adapted from video games have a bad reputation among fans of movies, video games, or both. ![]() For as long as I can remember, successful video game film adaptations have been nearly impossible to pull off. Nowadays I mainly play video games for the story – and the occasional Grand Theft Auto to let out some stress from the work week. I don’t do online multiplayer as much as I did in my middle school days of Modern Warfare and Halo 3. If you know me, you know I enjoy the occasional video game. ![]()
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