Tomb Raider - The Movie Everybody Forgot

movies truly are strange things some of them are so awesome that you feel privileged just to have experienced them while others are so overwhelmingly [ __ ] that they leave an indelible skid mark on your psyche for the rest of your life but good or bad they're all memorable in their own way then there's the ones that are so thoroughly bland and mediocre that five minutes after the credits roll you genuinely struggle to remember what the [ __ ] you just watched which brings me neatly along to tomb raider the second failed attempt to bring one of the most iconic video game characters in history to the silver screen the angelina jolie movies were a fun and light-hearted take on the franchise that got scuppered by a terrible second entry but the reboot promised us a high octane action adventure with a more grounded realistic lara that could kick ass and be more than just a sexual fantasy for sweaty disgusting teenagers such was their delusion unfortunately what we actually got was a dull derivative uninspired action flick heavily based around the dull derivative tomb raider reboot trilogy featuring a forgettable protagonist that feels like a background character in her own film tomb raider is the kind of movie that functions best when playing in the background while you do something far more interesting like drinking toilet duck ah no not toilet duck again anyway break out your pistols and padded bras and let dr drinker take a look so the movie kicks off with a little voiceover from lara's dad who's searching for the lost tomb of an evil japanese sorcerer lady that could apparently kill people just by touching them well that definitely sounds like the kind of thing you'd want to dig up anyway he [ __ ] off to find it and leaves young lara behind to fend for herself what's a great father flash forward 10 years and lara is now eking out 11 as a bike courier in between getting her ass kicked by cage fighters and having tried flashbacks to her childhood wait isn't lara croft supposed to be super rich or something nah this is the new and uh improved lara that rejected her privileged upbringing so she can waste her life scraping by in minimum wage jobs because i guess that's supposed to make her more relatable or something in reality it just makes her incredibly stupid the lara croft from the games wasn't cool because she pretended to be poor and working class in a desperate effort to seem relatable she was cool because she was unapologetic about who and what she was her wealth and resources gave her the ability to travel the world and embark on incredible adventures she didn't need to do it and she wasn't forced into it she chose to because it was fun and she had a thirst for exploration adventure and discovery in short she was a woman who chose a life of danger and excitement over safety and security and well that's just [ __ ] awesome but this version of lara is all hung up on her daddy she's convinced that he's still alive so she refuses to sign his death certificate out of some childish belief that a legal document somehow makes the thing real but do you know what would be even more useful to you massive amounts of financial resources that you could use to travel to the furthest corners of the world fund research into his movements hire teams of private investigators or secure the cooperation of local police and intelligence agencies you could actually use your father's wealth to find your father but nah those ubereats aren't going to deliver themselves anyway one day lara takes part in a dangerous game of cat and mouse where she earns prize money by outrunning a bunch of people chasing her on bikes and i don't mean harley davidson's here i'm talking push bikes anyway it's all going great until she has another flashback of her dad which causes her to crash into a police car and get arrested i mean she just went right over the hood of a car at high speed shouldn't you be in a hospital or something also what crime did she actually commit here is it illegal to get run over now anyway the script needs the rest of the plot to happen so off to jail she goes so she can get bailed out by shady businesswoman shady businesswoman used to work for lara's dad and explains that if she doesn't sign his death certificate and claim her inheritance all his assets are going to get sold off oh no what a conundrum do i accept this massive country mansion the family fortune and live out the rest of my life in obscene luxury or turn it down so i can carry on playing bike tag in london with a bunch of adult children coming from a filthy rich family is just such a drag isn't it lara but eventually lara has an attack of common sense and signs the paper but what's this a puzzle box a cryptic message a mysterious key i say old boy i smell adventure in the air oh wait that's just those corpses underneath my floorboards so lara goes to her family home and does some generic puzzle solving which leads her into a hidden lab beneath the family vault where she finds a message from her dad on an old video camera and damn the batteries on this thing must be harder than a quadratic equation because it still functions perfectly after sitting there for 10 years look i know stuff like this is done for the sake of movie convenience but honestly it still pisses me off when technology is shown to magically function years or even decades after it should have failed anyway whatever so her dad tells her to destroy all the research there especially the files on evil japanese sorcerer lady because it would be just terrible if that fell into the wrong hands so why didn't you just [ __ ] destroy it yourself then i mean if you were going on a dangerous mission with little chance of survival and you didn't want your daughter to suffer the same fate why would you give her literally everything she needs to track you down but those considerations don't matter because the script needs the rest of the plot to happen so naturally lara ignores his instructions and travels to hong kong to pick up his trail after chartering a ship that's somehow able to be operated by a single man she heads to the island where evil japanese sorcerer lady got buried but oh no the ship sinks in a storm and lara ends up getting captured by another group that got there first they're also looking for the tomb because they want to turn evil japanese sorcerer lady into a weapon of some kind because i guess ancient mythical historical figures are more effective on the battlefield than smart bombs guns and all of the combined chemical and biological weapons that modern science has already produced in massive quantities the problem is that these guys have had no luck so far mainly because their strategy for finding the tomb consists of randomly digging up the whole island and just hoping for the best so after monologuing for a while forgettable male villain can script lara and her mate into his workforce instead of you know just killing them i mean you know they're going to escape and hey go ah never mind i love how lara's friend basically does all the work and sacrifices his chance of escape so that she can get away damn this dude's more interesting and likable than the actual star of the movie anyway lara escapes into the jungle and look who happens to show up oh my god i'm so shocked that her father who disappeared in mysterious circumstances and constantly gets referenced throughout the script happens to show up just in time for the finale who could have predicted this so lara's dad explains that he's been here for the past 10 years and he wants to stop the evil mercenary guys from finding the tomb ignoring the fact that none of this would even be happening if he just destroyed his research before coming here oh richard you silly silly man lara on the other hand wants to free all the prisoners being used to slave labor so they part ways but naturally lara's dad [ __ ] it up and gets himself captured so lara surrenders and they all end up going into the tomb anyway this is just like raiders of the lost ark only not good so they avoid some totally impractical traps that could never actually exist in real life and make their way to evil japanese sorcerer lady and this [ __ ] opens up her coffin without any safety precautions and immediately turns into a [ __ ] zombie really you never thought to bring any kind of protective gear with you considering the whole purpose of this mission was to secure a biological weapon that's when lara realizes the evil japanese sorcerer lady wasn't actually evil at all but was infected with some kind of zombie virus i guess the patriarchy must have done it to her and had herself sealed in here to prevent the virus from spreading what the [ __ ] so this lady realized she'd become a carrier for some kind of super deadly virus that turns people into zombies in a matter of seconds uh okay where exactly did this virus come from don't know and she decided to isolate herself away to stop anyone else from catching it i mean it kind of makes sense i guess assuming that nobody else in the world has got it then i guess she just sat back and waited 20 years or so while armies of laborers constructed this huge elaborate tomb complex complete with booby traps and ornamental decoration and probably a [ __ ] hot tub and karaoke bar i mean what the [ __ ] was she even doing all this time how many tens of thousands of people must have died in the time it took to set this up and wouldn't everyone involved in the construction know exactly where her body was buried and what was going on and why seal your body and the virus away in a giant coffin where it's just gonna get preserved and discovered by future generations why not just kill yourself immediately and instruct your servants to cremate your body that way you would have solved the entire problem in a single day stupid japanese sorcerer lady anyway forgettable male villain snaps a finger from the corpse and makes a run for it but lara catches up to him beats the [ __ ] out of him and punches the finger right into his [ __ ] mouth then he turns into a zombie and she kicks him off a cliff and he dies oh yeah and her dad blows himself up to destroy the tomb then lara goes home and buys a pair of pistols because that's a thing you can totally do in london and i guess we're meant to be like oh [ __ ] she's becoming the real lara croft now but really all i was thinking was what the [ __ ] did i just watch anyway that's the plot for generic action movie with tomb raider in the title now i have to admit my hopes weren't exactly high going into this film the fact that it was directed by a norwegian that nobody's ever heard of with such classic movies to his name as a fistful of kebab and magic silver or that the screenplay was written by the woman who produced the uh story for captain marvel or that the biggest actor in the cast was only in the movie for about 15 minutes pretty much told me everything i needed to know then well i wasn't exactly disappointed in terms of world building action sequences visual style and overall storyline the movie borrows heavily from the rebooted tomb raider trilogy which i guess was inevitable since the game developers want to push their newest products the problem is that those games were basically cheap imitations of the uncharted series so what you're left with here is a copy of a copy and well the results speak for themselves tomb raider comes across as a generic action-adventure hybrid cynically stitching together elements from better games and movies and adding very little unique personality of its own i mean it's competently shot and most of the action scenes were reasonably well done but there's nothing smart or groundbreaking here jesus we don't even get any [ __ ] tomb raider until like the last 15 minutes i'll at least give the script credit for not making the main character into another rey or captain marvel which is kind of ironic given who wrote it this lara is a much more vulnerable and human version of the character she can overextend herself and get beaten down as a result she can make mistakes and get caught off guard and she can even get injured and frightened she actually goes on a bit of a journey in the course of the story becoming stronger and more competent by tackling adversity and ultimately learning to let go of the past and find new purpose with her life i mean it's not exactly shakespeare but it's better than most movies of its elk nowadays the problem i think is that they went a little too far in the opposite direction taking away her agency and making her weirdly passive and boring for most of the movie lara somehow manages to feel like a background character in her own story either following clues left by her father getting captured and having to be rescued by her friend lou ren or being coerced into helping forgettable male villain she always seems to be under the shadow of someone bigger and for a movie that tried to market itself on its strong empowered female character well she certainly spends a lot of time being influenced by the men in her life lara just seems to be along for the ride on this one bouncing from place to place until the next character or plot event comes along to tell her what to do next and the more time i spent with her the more i realized that i didn't particularly care what happened to her she's just not very interesting the situation isn't helped by the actress playing her now don't get me wrong alicia vikander seems like a nice person and she clearly put in the work to get in shape for the role she's stronger tougher and looks more physically capable than angelina jolie ever did but it feels like there's just something missing here and i'm not talking about the obvious if you want to play a larger than life character like lara croft you need serious charisma and magnetism to make the role your own and vikander just doesn't have it her portrayal here feels like she could be playing any generic female action hero and honestly i think that was my main takeaway from the movie as a whole tomb raider probably would have done better as a stand-alone action-adventure flick with a female lead and none of the baggage and expectations that come with the video game series by trying to stay grounded and realistic and spreading the narrative focus over a larger cast of characters it pushes away the very elements that once made the game so compelling and the end result is a movie that nobody particularly remembers or cares about which makes it doubly surprising that they're gonna make a [ __ ] sequel anyway that's all i've got for today go away now

Channel: The Critical Drinker

Views: 575,774

Rating: 4.9381237 out of 5

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Id: XL-N2Girifg

Length: 13min 40sec (820 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 16 2021