OK, the trailer for the new “Tomb Raider” movie looked bad, but I
really enjoyed the two Angelina Jolie movies from the early 2000’s, so
I thought I’d give it a shot. Big mistake! Alicia Vikander was great
as a sinister android in “Ex Machina” but she’s all wrong here. She
doesn’t have the build that Lara Croft is supposed to have, and she is
unable to project toughness and be a badass. Instead, we get a sweet
girl who REALLY loves her father. Her father, by the way, is played
by Dominic West as a bit of a dork who keeps calling her “sprout.”
The whole movie is about Lara’s quest to find her missing and
supposedly dead father.
I thought about walking out, but some of the
plotting was too promising: Lara finds her father on an almost
deserted island and together with some baddies dig up an old tomb of a
woman they think is a vampire who wanted to drink the world’s blood.
That’s not actually what she turns out to be, but there is about 25
minutes of good Indiana Jones rip-off stuff in the tomb where this
long-dead woman lives, but the rest of the film is misconceived and
slowly paced. I was hoping for a sexy, badass action movie and
instead I got a movie about a girl who means well. I think this film
is going to bomb big-time and it deserves to bomb big time. Next
time, executives, get a woman with some boobs and some sass! Please!