Tomb Raider review: Alicia Vikander makes Lara Croft her own

Roar Uthaug, 118 mins, starring: Alicia Vikander, Walton Goggins, Kristin Scott Thomas, Dominic West

The latest reboot of Tomb Raider begins in novel and engaging fashion as a story of ‘Lara Croft: hipster Hoxton cycle courier’. As first encountered here, Lara (Alicia Vikander) is delivering food for the “Snack Cycle” company and living as cheaply as she can. She is the heiress to a fortune but to come into the money, she needs to acknowledge her beloved father, Lord Richard Croft (Dominic West), is dead.

He has been away for seven years but she clings to the hope he might return. In the meantime, she’s slumming it, too poor even to pay for her mixed martial arts lessons. Lara is so strapped for cash that she agrees to play the “fox” in a madcap cycle race in which she is chased across the City of London by dozens of other riders.

These London-set scenes are by far the freshest part of a film which quickly degenerates the moment that Lara heads abroad. There is nothing in the latter part of the movie that we haven’t seen countless times before.

Vikander acquits herself well enough as the tank top wearing action heroine. A former ballet dancer, the Swedish actress is clearly very athletic. She knows how to take a tumble or how to dangle from a precipice without losing he dignity. Vikander, who appears in almost every scene in the movie, also brings some leavening tongue-in-cheek humour to proceedings, not least when negotiating with a lecherous pawnbroker (Nick Frost) for the money she needs to fund her mission.

Her real battle here is less with Himiko, the goddess of destruction, or with the thuggish Vogel (Walton Goggins), than with a screenplay that gives her so little to work with.

Lara heads east in search of her father. We know from multiple flashbacks that he is a dashing and debonair Indiana Jones type but one to the manor born. Little Lara (played as a youngster by Emily Carey, who looks nothing like Vikander) dotes on him and is always upset when he leaves home on his mysterious missions. She shares his sense of adventure and his self-reliance.

Norwegian director Roar Uthaug does a fair job with the action set-pieces. These range from a chase across the harbour in Hong Kong to a huge storm at sea. Lara, en route to an uninhabited island off the coast of Japan, is caught in the middle of the tempest, and tossed this way and that, bobbing like a cork on the waves.

Himiko has been entombed on the island. The evil forces of the shadowy Trinity organisation want to locate her burial place and harness her destructive powers. (Just what they plan to do with these powers is one of the many minor details the screenwriters decline to share with us.) All will presumably become clearer in the sequels – if this film is successful enough to justify making them.

Tomb Raider lacks a proper villain. Walton Goggins is a very reliable Hollywood character actor who excels at playing varmint-like cops (for example in TV’s The Shield) or the kind of weasel-faced cowboys who will always shoot you in the back. He is a serviceable henchman. What he isn’t is a Mr Big-style criminal mastermind. Himiko herself has been dead for thousands of years. This leaves a vacancy and no-one is on hand to fill it. Lara therefore doesn’t have the antagonist she deserves.

The fight sequences here are strictly routine. Characters will yell lines like “get the guns!” or “I’m going to get the sat phone!”as they slash and shoot at each other. From time to time, Lara is able to show off her impressive skills with a bow and arrow. During the final reel, we are treated to explosions and landslides.

Again, these are served up as if by rote. The most impressive stunts are those in which Lara takes on the natural world, trying desperately to stay alive in the jungle or dangling at the top of a raging waterfall. Vikander is at her most graceful during one extraordinary scene in which she clings first to an abandoned aeroplane’s wings and then to its fuselage as it crumbles around her.

Lara’s obsession here is with her father. She doesn’t have any energy spare to devote to romance. She flirts a little with the drunken Chinese sailor Lu Ren (Daniel Wu) who accompanies her to the mysterious island (and who has father issues of his own.) Her fellow cycle couriers clearly lust after her but she keeps them at arm’s length. With so many stunts, chases and fights cramming up the storyline, there is no space for candle lit dinners anyway.

Parts of the film feel very old fashioned. The film may be based on a video game but we could be back in the world of Ray Harryhausen B-movie matinee adventures of the 1960s and 1970s. The interior of the mountain top tomb is heavy on the papier maché rocks.

In its lesser moments, this revival of Tomb Raider feels as ill-advised as that of the recent Tom Cruise vehicle, The Mummy. Neither brings anything new to franchises that would have better been left undisturbed for a few more years. Vikander is striking enough as Lara Croft to make the role her own, to banish memories of Angelina Jolie (and perhaps to justify further instalments) but the film itself is strictly by the numbers.

‘Tomb Raider’ hits UK cinemas on 14 March