Video game adaptations have a long history of being, well … mostly completely terrible, thanks largely to the vapid efforts of one Uwe Boll. And even the most ardent Angelina Jolie fan would presumably admit that the Tomb Raider movies were hardly the Oscar-winner’s finest hour. So why would Alicia Vikander, Hollywood It girl and current art house dahling, sign up to star as Lara Croft in a reboot of the action-adventure series? Were there no Marvel superhero parts available?
Critics have reacted with predictable sniffiness to Norwegian director Roar Uthaug’s debut Hollywood outing, with the movie rated just 50% on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. And yet a quick glance at the site’s rundown of its best and worst reviewed video game adaptations suggests that might not be such a bad score after all. In fact, hang on a minute! It’s the joint highest ever rating for this type of film, sharing that honour with last year’s animated Resident Evil: Vendetta.
What’s your verdict? Should Lara have been allowed to climb out of her tomb and back into multiplexes? Or would you bury her back under some ancient rubble for at least a few more decades? Here’s your chance to give a verdict on the film’s key talking points.
Old Lara vs new Lara
Who boasts the finest cut-glass English accent? Angelina or Alicia? Did the new movie’s slightly more grounded approach appeal more than the 00s action cheese of the original films? Who made the best Daddy Croft, newcomer Dominic West, or the earlier films’ Jon Voight? And were the new movie’s screenwriters right to dispense with any real romantic interest for Lara this time around, hunky Daniel Craig replaced by a fellow from the local Indian restaurant who never quite summons up the coverage to ask Lara out?
East End chicanery and origins story fatigue
In 2001’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, we first meet Jolie as she is fighting a giant robot to retrieve a priceless diamond. In the new movie, Croft is living among the hoi polloi of Shoreditch, barely scraping a living as a bicycle courier because she refuses to admit her father is dead and lay claim to her spectacular inheritance. It’s a neat way to make Lara more relatable, but does rather fail when we know she only has to sign daddy’s death forms and walk half a mile south down Bishopsgate to be restored to the lap of luxury. Did you appreciate bearing witness to the birth of a legend? Or would you have happily skipped the first 45 minutes of the film?
Alicia Vikander: action hero
Despite failing to register with the critics, Jolie’s stint as Lara Croft did achieve the feat of setting her up as one of the more bankable female action heroes of the past 20 years, leading to sojourns in Mr and Mrs Smith, Wanted and Salt. Vikander is capable of her own uniquely spiky form of feminine menace, as exemplified by her sinister turn as a flirty robot in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, and she more than holds her own as the all-action archaeological explorer. Crucially, the Swedish actor always looks genuinely capable of taking down stronger male opponents, though the CGI-tastic finale in which she climbs through a collapsing torrent of boulders surely rather beggared belief.
The Indiana Jones rips
Given the inspiration for the original video game was a certain whip-cracking archaeologist, it’s probably a little unfair to criticise Tomb Raider for swiping too heavily from Raiders of the Lost Ark. But there was a moment down in the final resting place of long-dead Japanese queen Himiko when nobody in the auditorium would have been too surprised to hear Harrison Ford whisper “close your eyes” as the baddies furtively prised open her ancient tomb. Ditto the ladder over a sharp fall, which recalled the precarious bridge scene in Temple of Doom. Did Tomb Raider do enough to freshen up the genre? I thought the deadly puzzle with the multi-coloured stones was a neat spin.
The franchise-building intrigue
Forgive me if I haven’t a clue what Trinity is, or why the sinister organisation is so desperate to dig up 2,000-year-old zombie queens. The end of Tomb Raider left us wondering if Croft’s one-time guardian Ana Miller (Kristin Scott Thomas) is somehow connected to the evil grouping. Regular players of the video game can perhaps enlighten us as to why exactly we should give a damn. But at least this means we might see Scott Thomas get her evil on in a sequel – Uthaug’s movie has so far done quite reasonably at the international box office, so that’s a prospect we shouldn’t write off just yet. Will you be going to see part two?
