[yasr_overall_rating]
Lara Croft, the fiercely independent daughter of a missing adventurer, must push herself beyond her limits when she finds herself on the island where her father disappeared.
Just in case you caught that dig, let me be upfront by saying I haven’t played the video game nor have I seen any of the previous “Tomb Raider” films. However, I still stand by my assessment if only for the simple fact that it doesn’t take much clever thinking to imagine what this film is aiming at.
Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander) is a 20-something street rat scrabbling for quids with her bike and her sheer determination. Yet, in reality, her determination is actually only sheer stubbornness because she is the daughter of Lord Richard Croft (Dominic West) who is very, very, very wealthy. She refuses to claim her inheritance because her father disappeared years ago and she can’t quite reconcile herself to the truth that if she signs the papers, she is, in effect, saying that he is dead.
But something changes her mind. I can’t remember what the catalyst is. It wasn’t that meaningful as a motivation, but it honestly doesn’t matter either, since we all know this film needs to move to the obvious heroics intended for Lara.
It turns out that Lord Richard wasn’t busy all those years with boardrooms and business meetings. Instead, he was….actually, I don’t know this either. A treasure hunter? A historian trying to save the world from other treasure hunters? Who knows. Obviously, all the pieces of this puzzling plot are not necessary to accomplish the end goal of a teeny tiny (5’5”) Lara Croft performing unbelievable acrobatics in a race to save her father (who turns out not to be dead, of course) and, oh, also the entire world.
The characters are conveniently generic – and multilingual – as Lara is suddenly taken with the notion to track down her father by way of China. Amazingly, somehow, in this giant country, teeny tiny Lara (amidst the thrills of almost getting robbed and knifed) manages to quickly find the son of the man from whom Lord Richard first requested passage to an unknown island of an ancient Chinese death witch. Now British daughter of a presumably dead treasure hunter and Chinese son of presumably dead sea captain match up to replay the past. Fortunately, they have no translation problems whatsoever, since dead sea captain must have been smart enough to teach his son perfect English before disappearing years ago.
The puzzles are not puzzling. All of the cleverness of the plot is already rightly assumed to be perfectly acceptable to the masses. Lara only has to turn a few giant wheels with her teeny, tiny arms and somehow the cave opening to the burial grounds of the witch crumbles at her fingertips. She even brilliantly deduces that blue and yellow make green. The cave itself is kind of mystifying as the crew slowly realizes that the empress of death had a noble secret.
Still, what makes any storytelling platform truly successful is the ability to entice the audience into the suspension of disbelief (if the nature of the story is far removed from our real-world experiences). For me, “Tomb Raider” barely qualifies and it does so not on the merit of its storytelling, but more likely only because of the quality of the audience who will readily laugh and gasp and cheer at the raised cue cards. I, however, couldn’t wait for the raised credits.
In theaters Friday, March 16th
