Tomb Raider (2018)

Here's the thing about Tomb Raider: it's not bad enough to be interesting and not good enough to be exciting. It sits in that frustrating middle ground where you can see exactly what they were going for, you can appreciate the effort involved, and you still come away feeling almost nothing. Two and a half hours after it starts (it isn't that long, it just feels it), the overwhelming sensation is one of mild, polite disappointment.

The ambition is clear. This is an origin story stripped of glamour, a Lara Croft who bleeds, scrambles, panics, and has to earn every inch of her survival rather than gliding through danger with a smirk. Alicia Vikander commits to that completely. She's physically convincing, emotionally present, and brings a real intelligence to the role. You believe she's a person rather than a video game avatar come to life. That's genuinely no small thing, and she deserved a better film around her. Does she top Angelina Jolie? For me, no. Jolie had a magnetic, almost otherworldly cool that made the earlier films crackle even when the scripts were daft. Vikander's Lara is more grounded, more human, but the film treats that realism as an excuse to sand away everything fun and strange and pulpy that made Tomb Raider worth adapting in the first place.

The action sequences are the saving grace. There's a chase and fall sequence involving a rusted wreck over a waterfall that's properly tense, and the hand-to-hand stuff lands with real weight. You feel every hit. Walton Goggins does his reliable best as the villain, a stranded, increasingly unhinged man running a sinister operation on a remote island, and he's watchable whenever he's on screen. But even he can't rescue dialogue and plotting that plays every beat completely straight, never once allowing itself a wink or a moment of genuine wonder.

That's what drains the life out of it. Great adventure films, the ones you think about for years afterwards, carry a sense of the world being larger and stranger than you thought. There's none of that here. The island is all grey skies and muddy browns, shot and lit like a prestige thriller rather than a pulpy adventure. The puzzles and ancient secrets feel obligatory rather than thrilling. You keep waiting for the film to loosen up, to let itself enjoy the inherent absurdity of booby-trapped tombs and mystical MacGuffins, and it never does. The tone is relentlessly dour, as if excitement itself was considered a little embarrassing.

I think about something like Mad Max: Fury Road and how it took a similar grounded-but-heightened approach to a returning franchise and absolutely swung for the fences with it. That film trusted its own wildness. This one doesn't trust anything, and the caution shows in every frame.

What you're left with is a film that avoids the worst pitfalls of video game adaptations but replaces them with a different problem: blandness. It's competently made, well-acted, and entirely forgettable. The script plays so safe that it never builds genuine momentum, and the pacing stalls badly between the action beats, leaving you to notice how thinly sketched the supporting characters are and how little you actually care what's in the mysterious tomb.

Two and a half stars. Decent action, a committed lead performance, and a promising setup that goes absolutely nowhere interesting. A missed opportunity, and that's the most damning thing I can say about it.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 2018  | Watched: 2025-10-20

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Where to watch

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