Good news, movie fans! I’ve discovered the least interesting film ever made and it’s the new Tomb Raider. Note that I didn’t say that its bad. No, I at least remember bad movies and this does nothing to warrant an emotional response close to labelling it bad. It also certainly isn’t good, that’s for fucking sure. I have watched paint dry with more personality than this movie. If you ever wanted to see the definition of people going through the motions to make use of an intellectual property, then lo and behold the astounding blandness of Tomb Raider in 2018.
The film begins with Lara Croft (played by Alicia Vikander in this version) living a simple life because she refuses to accept her inheritance because that would require her to acknowledge that her long-lost billionaire father is actually dead. Of course, she finds clues that he actually isn’t dead and blah blah and she ends up on an island where people are trying to find a tomb because it contains a corpse with supernatural powers and blah blah and she gradually becomes the hero that she is supposed to be. Fucking blah. Walton Goggins shows up as the villain and we know he’s the villain because he’s played by Walton fucking Goggins. Oh and this is one of those movies where the final plot twist is so obvious that you spend most of the film waiting for the characters to figure it out. I had hoped that they would get it out of the way by the halfway point, but, no, they go all the way to the end with it. Great.
The old Tomb Raider movies are stupid, sure. But at least I remember that they are stupid. They gave me something. I mean, she fucking punches a shark in the face in one of them. I cherish the idiocy of that moment. This movie gives me nothing, not a goddamn thing, to talk about. As best I can recall, this shares similarities with the old movies: Lara has daddy issues and ends up having to find some sort of artifact before a bad guy does (she has to go tomb raiding, if you will). But this is so freaking bland. The film is the American debut of Norwegian director Roar Uthaug, who sounds like he became a filmmaker after a failed career battling the Power Rangers. Good old Roar directs this movie with the pizzazz of a DMV employee telling you that you’re in the wrong line. Everything about this film, from the staging to the lighting to the framing, is so mind-numbingly mechanical that I suspect Roar Uthaug is actually a robot director that the studio is testing to reduce costs. There is not a single character or line of dialogue that you will remember from this movie. It’s all shit that you have seen before, but its not even amusingly derivative. Imagine watching Raiders of the Lost Ark except nobody gave a shit when they were making it. The director and writer both clearly come from the “here’s the fucking thing you wanted, now give me my paycheck” school of filmmaking. It really is a marvel of indifference.
I really like Alicia Vikander. I really, really do. I wish she would return my phone calls. She is both more talented and more pretty than Angelina Jolie (yeah I said that, wanna fight about it?) and she is trying here. She is really trying, but there is just nothing to work with. She does infuse the role with more physicality than Jolie did and is more believable than Jolie, but that doesn’t make it more fun. Lara Croft has no personality in this movie. She seems to be in a competition with every other character over who can give the most stern looks. I’m not that familiar with the games (the last one I remember seeing is Tomb Raider 3 on the original Playstation), but is she really this fucking boring in the games? For a character so clearly inspired by Indiana Jones, it’s astonishing what a void of personality she is. Give me some sarasm, some charisma, some bitchiness, fucking anything. Vikander is an amazing actress, so I’m more inclined to blame the script for this, but she was less robotic in Ex Machina when she was actually playing a fucking robot. Walton Goggins is also one of my favorite actors these days, but he could play this part in his sleep and actually seems to be doing exactly that. I assume that there are other characters in the movie, but don’t even remember enough to criticize them.
I recently read a reference to the remake of Poltergeist and I thought it was a mistake because there isn’t a remake of Poltergeist. After looking at some pictures online, I realized that not only is there a remake of Poltergeist, I went to the theater to see the fucking thing. I completely forgot that those two hours of my life ever happened. I fully expect that the same thing will happen with Tomb Raider in a couple of years. Much like Poltergeist and that new Death Wish from a few weeks ago, Tomb Raider only exists because a studio executive realized that they owned the rights to it and just wanted something in theaters to make a buck and be forgotten. It’s a sad, cynical corporate product of a film that makes me long for the days of Angelina Jolie punching a fucking shark in the face.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomb_Raider_(film)#/media/File:Tomb_Raider_(2018_film).png
