Friday, March 16, 2018

"Tomb Raider (2018)" review



The first good video game movie has... yet to arrive.





Based on the 2013 reboot of the iconic video game franchise telling the story of Lara Croft, a young archaeologist struggling to survive her first expedition gone wrong and destined to go on to become something of a modern Indiana Jones, “Tomb Raider’s” mediocrity may technically put it above a large amount of the abysmal output of cinematic video game adaptations but its bizarrely lacking ambition relative to the resources sunken into it make it one of the most difficult to watch in recent history.

Alicia Vikander assumes the role of the titular “Tomb Raider,” searching for her long lost father on an adventure about as removed from any sense of exotic archaeological flavoring as possible until the final act of the film, after a stock origin opening attempting to unconvincingly downplay her wealth and potential life of privilege in favor of willingly living as a working class street urchin that doesn’t seem to grasp that the reason the first act of “Batman Begins” worked so well was because the audience was allowed to watch its sympathetic protagonist work through his damage and gave a reason for dissociating himself with his family’s legacy.

What ensues is a painfully generic action film with minor pieces of generic survival film tropes that blur into a slurry of just competent enough filmmaking that the production rising out of it would be rendered terminally boring if it weren’t for the jarring placement of puzzle solving scenes evoking video game set pieces, action sequences desperately attempting to recreate gameplay to embarrassing results, and the out of place strong performances of three of its stars.

That last point is of particular note because it pushes the film over from painlessly forgettable into frustrating.

This production did not deserve this level of talent and Vikander particularly manages to transcend the horrendous dialogue of the script to give a performance that basically carries the entire movie and it shows.

Despite being poorly written and established as a character by all accounts, her conviction to making Lara a woman coming to terms with loss, fiercely intuitive and courageous in the face of danger while displaying true human vulnerability without undercutting her displays of strength is noticeably more finely crafted than almost anything else in the movie in a contrast that can be borderline hilarious.

In a race to the contents of a hidden temple with an outfit of cartoonishly one dimensional corporate mercenaries, so badly written they resort to the old cliché of gunning down slave labor too  tired and sick to work, she finds herself in a chase that leads her being forced down a river ending in a waterfall onto a worn out and rusted plane that collapses under her weight and leaves her to parachute  into the jungle foliage below where she is pummeled by tree branches and skipped across the ground like a stone onto a lake.

The sequence is so over the top and out of place that even she looks as though she can’t believe that it’s happening. It’s the kind of thing that “Indiana Jones” got eviscerated for doing almost 10 years ago, yet she manages to sell it and the pain of her injuries from it like she just walked away from a scene in an R-rated horror flick, followed up by a scene forcing her to brutally make her first kill while briefly reflecting on the trauma such an act brings.

Dominic West plays her father, Richard Croft, who gets in a few remarkably tender moments for a generic film in desperate need of personal touch while her partner played by Daniel Wu receives a criminally small amount to actually contribute to the story but provides a much needed charisma lacking in any other character of the movie,

Their performances, high in quality yet snuffed out by the mechanics of a critically unimaginative yet overbearing narrative, highlight the largest problem with “Tomb Raider” in a nutshell; it isn’t concerned with quality so much as safety.

The film is so lacking in any sort of ambition that it more or less meets its goals and still fails to leave any true impression, despite having people on board that really did take it seriously, whose efforts are rendered moot by a lack of investment, talent, or both from the director and screenwriters.

Say what you may about a video game adaptation like, “Warcraft,” it at least came from a place of care, passion, and talent that made it fascinating to watch unfold, even if the film itself was not objectively good. By contrast, this movie is so empty and devoid of any true substance that you can’t help but ask why they bothered to make it in the first place.

This movie is a microcosm of exactly why video game adaptations are facing an uphill battle; its producers and filmmakers weren’t concerned with making a great movie but merely a safely marketable one to gouge a few dollars out of the curious onlooker and that is exactly what it is.

“Tomb Raider” is safe, marketable, and watchable, which does make it a cut above its many peers in the field of video game based movies. Neither of those facts makes it a good film in its own right.

4 Conspicuously Absent Dual Pistol Sets out of 10

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