Lara Croft is back and less busty. The movie opens with an apparently poverty-stricken Lara who works as a bike courier, steals apples, and can't pay her bill for her boxing class. This is different. A surprising amount of time is spent showing the trials of Lara's hardscrabble life - including a bike race - before we discover she could control a vast fortune if only she would sign a document that her father - missing for many years - is dead. She finally agrees to sign and gets an item that her father left for her. It leads to a secret vault that launches her on a search for her father.
The story follows the plot of the Tomb Raider reboot (2013) though it purges the supernatural aspects. Having played the game, a lot of the scenes were very familiar. However, the tacked on story about her missing father was a huge distraction that was there for sequel considerations. In fact, there was so much effort to prepare the ground for a Tomb Raider Cinematic Universe that the story at hand was rushed.
Alicia Vikander was good as Lara. She is competent but not a superhero. When confronted by three hoodlums, she wisely ran. Dominic West was cloying as her doltish father. At one point, Lara is determined to fight and Lord Richard just watches her go. What? He then shows up and gets captured like a buffoon. This guy is a famous adventurer? Walton Goggins, who has been great in Justified and The Hateful Eight, doesn't come across as the right person for this role. The lead of this team should be a geologist, a mining engineer, or an archeologist; this guy is a good ol' boy with lots of explosives. Daniel Wu had a surprisingly large role as the owner of the boat that Lara hires. The producers had to have the villain's act stupidly so that Wu could survive for the hoped-for sequel.
There is ludicrous action but there are no giant robots, animated stone monsters, time-controlling talismans, or bizarre otherworldly chamber of black goo with Pandora's Box. Fun but unfocused.
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