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.
