My Review of "Tomb Raider"

Tomb Raider came out as a bit a surprise for me. I remember back in the day there were two Tomb Raider movies that starred Angelina Jolie. This is the remake starring Alicia Vikander. The mood and the atmosphere of the movie has changed dramatically since the old movies. I've never really played the Tomb Raider video games but I remember that this movie came out right around the time when they were revamping the Tomb Raider video game series as well.

This story starts out with Lara Croft in a gym sparring with someone at some sort of martial art. She ultimately loses and we're brought to believe that she's got no money and no real goals in her life. This is quite the opposite from what I remembered Lara Croft to be in the past. I already thought, wow they're really doing a whole 360 with this character.

Soon I learn that all of the exploits in the beginning of the movie are just to foreshadow the skills that she would later in the movie have to display to the audience. I guess it makes sense since we wouldn't understand how she can do certain things unless they explained that she had been working on the skill earlier in the movie. The thing is that a lot of the skills are pretty random and don't really gel into the movie. It's kind of like a mishmash of activities that she does for fun that don't really need to be in the movie. We know she's Lara Croft she's like a superhero tomb raider. It says it in the name of the movie.

We later learn that she isn't poor after all. Her father had been some sort of researcher that found out about this ancient Japanese witch that apparently had this mystical power. She's basically a weapon and her father set out to find this mythical character 7 years ago. He hadn't been seen since.

They've basically presumed him dead and Lara inherits his fortune. Of course the money isn't important to Lara. She's got a dying hope that maybe her father is still alive and she's sets out to try to find him.

Along the way to find her lost father she meets up with some drunken pirate who helps her get to the mysterious island that her father had lost communication from. They soon realize that there are a lot of weird things about the island and worse of all there are goons and bad guys that they have to worry about.

The movie kind of takes a lot of inspiration from the Uncharted video game series. At least a lot of the movie reminds me of that game. There are a ton of conveniently crazy situations Lara gets into and she has equally the same amount of luck to get out of all of these situations. It's odd because the tone of the movie is quite serious but the situations that she gets herself in and out of are quite comedic because of the exaggerations of the situations. There's no possible way someone can fall a few stories down to the ground not receive any scrapes or bruises but a nail to her stomach. It's absurd and I think they could have played with that to make this movie more fun. I just thought the tone was a little off on this one.

All of the actors did a good job in this one. The drunken pirate guy was a little off though. It kind of felt at times he was just reading lines from a teleprompter. Don't expect crazy a crazy good story with this one. It's wild and absurd but that isn't a bad thing. I just thought that the tone of the movie was a little mixed and felt a bit off.

Overall, I enjoyed this movie. It was a fun ride from start to finish but wasn't exactly anything mind blowing. I wouldn't watch this movie over and over again but it is a good one time watch. I have to give this movie a 7 out of 10. If there's nothing to watch, give it a try.