Alicia Vikander is the new Lara Croft. Unlike Angelina Jolie’s sexed up, steely avatar, Vikander is vulnerable. Punches and knives can leave her wounded, and she gasps for breath during brawls. Does that mean Vikander is a better Lara Croft? The answer is akin to walking on the precarious bridge between yes and no.
This Croft adventure has been designed as an origin story. Lara leads a reckless biker life, and practises combat skills. She is the heir apparent of a million-dollar company but prefers to stay out of the temptations of money. Reason? Well, Lara’s father Richard (Dominic West) went missing several years ago, and she initially doesn’t want to acknowledge his death. Eventually when she actually does, the inheritance provides her clues left by her father. These lead her to a perilous adventure, from Hong Kong to the Devil’s sea.
Video game adaptations have always been the nadir of cinematic invention, leaving directors in the land of the dead. Roar Uthaug is the newest immigrant entrant, straight from Norway who displayed quite a showmanship in The Wave (2015), in which fury of nature locked everyone in for a few sweaty hours.
But Hollywood seems to have rendered the Norwegian director sterile, for this revamp not only gives out the stink of cash grab, it also lifts some memorable sequences of modern cinema with a brazen grin.
There is a scene in which Lara and her Asian friend Lu Ren (Daniel Wu) brave a storm in the Devil’s sea, jigging through pokey rocks, and swelling waters. The scene, though quite plausibly picturised, is a poor fake of Peter Jackson’s imagination in which Carl Denham and Ann Darrow try to get to Skull Island in King Kong. Another scene puts Lara in a defunct aircraft at the edge of a waterfall, calling out the ghosts from The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
The rest is a tired mystery about the tomb of a mythical queen Himiko, a terrorist organisation called Trinity, and of course, a scheme that could destroy the world. But for Lara, it’s all about her father before sense dawns upon her.
This father-daughter story provides an emotional heft that was quite absent in the earlier Tomb Raider adaptations.
But that can hardly rescue the wafer-thin story. And for an adventure, the surprises are too predictable, the action too naïve, and the puzzle not really in need of any brain work. The result is a limp-legged Lara. Sigh.
(The writer is a journalist, a screenwriter, and a content developer who believes in the insanity of words, in print or otherwise. He tweets @RanjibMazumder)
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