Movie Review: Tomb Raider 2018

Video game movies are notorious for not being done well. I can honestly say that isn’t the case here. I wouldn’t say this was the best movie I’d seen, or that it was the best video game movie, but it was a good movie. It kept you sort of guessing, had lots of puzzles to watch being solved, very much like the game. At the same time, the movie strived for emotional moments that it never quite hit. It’s been a day and I’ve already forgotten some of the movie. There were lots of great set pieces, big action sequences, but that doesn’t make for a good movie, per say.

There may be SPOILERS ahead, so you’ve been warned. If you’ve never played a Tomb Raider game, this movie might not fully make sense, in a ‘why would anyone do this’ sort of way. The movie tries to tell the story of Lara Croft trying to discover what happened to her father. She doesn’t want to admit that he probably died on a treasure hunt, so to speak. Her guardian has to come bail her out of jail or something to introduce the audience to Lara’s immense responsibility and wealth, while she was living like a pauper for the first bit of the movie. In his will, Lara’s father gifts her with some sort of puzzle box and so she runs off, not signing the papers, which I thought was kind of funny, and tries to get some money for a necklace and then runs off to the other side of the world. Of course, there are mercenaries that are living on an island since her father’s disappearance, trying to find what was hidden. Lara escapes, with the help of a local, and somehow finds her father, who has gone a little crazy, and the two have a strange reunion before Lara takes a bow and arrows and runs off to defeat the heavily armed mercenaries. It doesn’t end the way she had hoped and Lara ends up leading them inside the tomb, to find the treasure, only discovering the treasure is really an active disease that passes through touch. As you might guess, this proves costly and Lara knows that she can’t let it get out, so once again she’s fighting with the mercenaries to stop the disease from getting free.

The diversity in the movie, as per my Hina test, was okay. Yes, the movie was helmed by a female actress, one that doesn’t seem to be white. But most of the cast was white, except the Asian actors, all men, who were on the island, being held hostage by the mercenaries. It didn’t strike me as all that empowering, even though it should have been. I didn’t get a positive vibe from the movie, not really. That might just be me.

I am not sure I can recommend this movie or not. It was enjoyable, but was it worth $10, I’m not sure. I wonder if I’d like it better if I saw it again.