Tomb Raider
Dir: Roar Uthaug
2018
**

It has been over twenty years since I’ve played Tomb Raider and I can’t say I remember much about it other than being chased by dogs and dinosaurs, not being able to jump over ledges very well but being impressed with the graphics. The last time I saw the Angelina Jolie adaptation was also the first time back in 2001 and I was less impressed. I do however remember thinking it followed the style of the game enough to regard it as an adequate adaption but then video game adaptions are a funny thing anyway. The first thing that struck me about 2018’s Tomb Raider was just how unlike the original game it was. This however is not surprising, as it is based on the 2013 re-boot of the game that totally passed me by. The 2013 re-boot of the game seems to have been inspired by Raiders of the Lost Arc and Lara Croft now seems to be less dynamic as she used to be. To be honest, I had no anticipation for this film, I neither love nor hate the Tomb Raider franchise but I do love a classic adventure film and I like Alicia Vikander. I was also quite excited and intrigued by the choice of Roar Uthaug as director. His 2015 disaster film The Wave was pretty good and a nice change from the usual Hollywood-centric action film. However, the film never reeled me in, I was totally open but nothing of interest and nothing I hadn’t seen before happened. In all honesty, the first chapter of the film got on my nerves. Following the disappearance of her father seven years ago, Lara Croft makes a living as a bike courier. She trains at a local gym, lives in a squalid flat (in a very expensive area of London) but has no money. Her clothes are designer and her bike is top of the range – but she’s skint. Her colleagues challenge her one day to act as a fox in an urban hunt involving bicycles. She basically has a tin of paint attached to the back of her bike and around a hundred other cyclists have to chase her and catch her before the paint runs out. If they don’t, she wins £500. She agrees and is chased around London. Thing is, she is chased around impossible areas of London to access by bike and the geography is all wrong. Why do films do this? So many people will know that Fleet Street isn’t next to Brick Lane, they are two of London’s most famous streets and popular tourist destinations. As a proud Londoner it irks me. Also, she could not live in a Brick Lane apartment – even if it is just a room – on a courier’s salary. More annoying is that after she is arrested by the police for her illegal bike chase (and reckless vandalism regarding the paint she’s left everywhere) it turns out she has inherited her fathers fortune (her father is played by Dominic West – for the second time following 2014’s Testament of Youth), it’s just that she hasn’t signed the papers claiming any of it. She thinks that if she does she is declaring him dead, ignoring the fact that she could just give it back to him should he return alive at any time. But no, the family mansion is falling into disrepair and all his stuff is rotting away. I know the idea is to make Lara an everywomen and not the privileged character she was originally but actually this new Lara is dumb and hard to like. The ‘hard up’ message is a little forced, and if you want to get into the poor versus the privileged then what about the big empty mansion that has been abandoned? How many people could live there. I’m wandering from the film review here I know but this sort of bad writing really hacks me off. Her father’s business partner Ana Miller (Kristin Scott Thomas in a pointless five minute cameo) posts her bail and warns her that if she does not claim her vast inheritance, her father's country estate, Croft Manor, will be sold off. Just as she is about to sign Mr. Yaffe, an associate at Croft Holdings (Derek Jacobi in a pointless three minute cameo) gives her a puzzle her father left to her in his will. She grabs it and forgets to sign – Jesus Christ she’s annoying. Lara follows a clue and gains access to a secret chamber in her father's tomb. There she finds a pre-recorded video message from him detailing his research into Himiko, the mythical Queen of Yamatai who was said to command the power over life and death. Her father warns Lara to destroy all of his research so it doesn’t get into the wrong hands (namely a secret organisation called Trinity who also want the power of Himiko) but Lara decides not to so she can investigate further. She decides to pawn the necklace her father gave her before he left and tells the pawn shop owner (Nick Frost) that it is valuable. He doesn’t check, he simply believes her because she is pretty, and hands over ten thousand pounds – because that is exactly how pawn shops work. To make the scene even worse, Lara purposely knocks hot coffee over Frost when he lowers his office, which doesn’t make us warm to her any more. It also features Jaime Winstone. With her money, Lara travels to Hong Kong where she hires Lu Ren, captain of the ship Endurance, to sail into the Devil's Sea and the island of Yamatai. Lu Ren turns out to be the son of the captain Lara's father hired to take him to the island seven years ago. The ship runs into rocks in a violent storm as they approach the island. Lu Ren, a self-confessed experienced sailor, clearly doesn’t know how to sail in bad weather or use radar. Lara is of course washed ashore unscathed and barely wet where she is knocked unconscious by a strange figure. She is revived by Mathias Vogel (Walton Goggins, the leader of an expedition to locate Himiko's tomb. The expedition has been funded by a shadowy organization called Trinity that seeks to harness and weaponize Himiko's power. Vogel takes Lara prisoner, claiming that he killed her father and intends to use Richard's research to continue his expedition. Now don’t get me wrong, Walton Goggins is a good actor but he’s such a lazy and obvious choice of bad guy and at this point I actually wanted him to succeed. He adds Lara and Lu Ren to his slave force but soon Lara escapes with the help of Lu (after learning Vogel murdered his father), who stays behind after being severely injured. Lara is washed down a wild river, jumps onto the wreck of crashed WW2 bomber and parachutes into thick jungle. This particular series of action sequences is more than tiresome. Somehow, we are supposed to believe that a WW2 bomber – that has sat on the edge of a waterfall for over seventy years on an island partial to extreme weather, will suddenly crumble when a 91lb girl steps on it for a few seconds. I’m also pretty sure it is near impossible to parachute just by holding the parachute pack without having it on your back – keeping hold of it would be hard enough – but add the fact that all the material has rotten away, I don’t buy the physics. I’m all for a bit of fantasy and escapism but this action sequence felt like it was making up for lost time. Lara sleeps but wakes again after nightfall and is forced to kill a Trinity guard when she is nearly discovered. She follows a mysterious figure wandering the island and discovers that the figure is her father, who stayed on the island to prevent Trinity from finding Himiko's tomb. After Lara convinces him that she is real and not a figment of his imagination, Richard treats her injuries. Despite his protests, Lara sets off to recover his research from Vogel's camp. Lara makes contact with Lu Ren, and he, along with the fishermen, stage distractions that allow Lara to infiltrate the Trinity camp and recover her father's research. In the ensuing chaos, Richard makes his way to Himiko's tomb and is captured by Vogel, who persuades Lara to open the tomb. I say captured, he just walks up to them like an idiot. The film then turns into full on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade mode when the party navigates a series of booby traps before locating Himiko's sarcophagus. Two Trinity soldiers attempt to remove her corpse but become infected by Himiko's "power", which is actually a disease so potent that mere physical contact triggers immediate bodily disintegration, and reduces those infected to an aggressive zombie-like state. Images around the tomb reveal that Himiko, who was apparently immune to the virus herself and was a carrier, came to the island voluntarily rather than being forced as the legends imply, sacrificing herself to contain the virus. Himiko and her lot must have had more money then sense, as the elaborate tomb must have cost a fortune, when all she had to do was ask her friends to burn her body once she died – job done! Vogel concludes that he cannot remove Himiko's body and instead settles for detaching a finger, which he seals in a pouch. In the confusion, Lara and Richard overpower the remaining soldiers, though Vogel escapes and Richard becomes infected. Knowing there is no cure, Richard proposes destroying Himiko's tomb to prevent the disease from spreading across the world - because blowing things up won’t ever end up spreading anything. The fact that a water supply surrounds the tomb seems to go unnoticed. Lara pursues Vogel as Richard sets off a bomb, killing himself and sealing the tomb. Lara confronts Vogel and the two fight. Lara force-feeds him Himiko's severed finger and kicks him into a deep chasm as the infection takes over. She escapes the tomb as it collapses, meets back up with Lu Ren and the fishermen, and commandeers a Trinity helicopter to escape Yamatai. Courier to killer in just under a week. Lara then returns to London, where she formally accepts her inheritance and inadvertently discovers that Trinity's front company, Patna, is actually a subsidiary of Croft Holdings. She proceeds to investigate Trinity further and begins to suspect that Ana Miller is one of their agents who manipulated her into accepting her inheritance in order to have Lara sign over control of Croft Holdings' business operations to her when Richard Croft stopped cooperating with Trinity. Having witnessed Trinity's ruthlessness firsthand, she prepares for her next adventure by going back to the pawn shop, getting her necklace back for the same money she got for it and spending it on two hand guns – her signature guns from the game. It is the only thing I recognised from the game but at this point I didn’t much care. Pawn shops in the UK do not sell guns as we do not have guns in the UK. Sure you can buy guns for hunting and target sports but I’m pretty sure you can’t just rock up to a pawn shop and buy them and I’m also pretty sure most pawn shops don’t have a full arsenal of weapons round the back that customers are welcome to rummage through. The ending is presumptuous in that it suggests they’ll be another film, it’ll be a crime if there is but the fact that the film made less than the first film in 2001 suggests to me that this will soon be a forgotten incident and the end of any further Tomb Raider talk until the next unimaginative young producer walks through the studio doors – which is probably sooner than we’d hope.