Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander) lives her life poor, and is sort of bad at things. In between delivering food on her bike she’s a fighter, but gets her ass kicked in the ring. She participates in bike race fox hunt things that lame script writers throw in to add excitement, but she just ends up hit by a car. She’s doing everything she can to avoid the fact that her father, Richard Croft (Dominic West), disappeared when she was a child. Never to return. Lara has chosen the life of a loser to avoid signing her father’s death papers, and receiving the Croft fortune.
When she’s finally convinced by an executive of the Croft company to sign her father’s death papers she also receives a cryptex. The easiest cryptex to solve ever. This sets off a series of events that cribs from the Indiana Jones series, The Da Vinci Code, National Treasure, and 28 Days Later. Not surprisingly, it does none of this well.
The cryptex left by Richard leads Lara to his secret lair back at Croft Manor. It turns out he was a mentally ill man with too much time and money trying to find an ancient Japanese evil that he believes can be reawakened, and whose tomb is on an uninhabited island near Japan. Richard Croft instructs Lara through a video to destroy all of his documents relating to this because it would be too dangerous in the wrong hands. The first thing she does is ignore all of that, and through a series of unimportant events with characters who ultimately don’t matter brings her father’s grail diary the Nazi’s need her father’s evil Japanese woman diary that the evil corporation needs right into the bad guy’s hands.
In this case the bad guy is played by Walton Goggins, a normally bad ass actor, who is doing his best with a lousy script and crappy haircut to appear menacing. He’s working for a company also trying to find the tomb, although we’re given NO reason why they are trying to find it. It’s never discussed. He does shoot an old Asian guy dead for having the temerity of coughing a lot, so, that was pretty cool. Lara easily escapes his bumbling gang of beefy enforcers with terrible aim, survives multiple exciting mishaps, sustains a mortal wound that she doesn’t bleed out from miraculously, and magically finds her weird dad who is now Cave Dad. Cave Dad, to his credit, says what’s on all of our minds: YOU BROUGHT THE DIARY TO THE ISLAND? WHAT KIND OF STUPID DAUGHTER DID I RAISE? After this very good point is noted, Lara decides to save all of the Japanese people I’ve neglected to mention that the bad guys were using as slaves to find the tomb. What follows is a slapstick battle where I would have to guess 87 innocent victims are gunned down. Cave Dad uses this as an opportunity to go to the tomb, and gets caught like an idiot. To everyone else’s credit when Cave Dad says it will awaken an evil if they go in the tomb, everyone says: YOU HAVE WEIRD DREADS AND SMELL LIKE CHEESE. LETS GET THIS MOVIE OVER WITH.
What follows is a series of Indiana Jones rip offs. Do we have the hallway with the giant closing circle doors? Check. Do we have a chasm that must be traversed? Check. Do we have a falling floor? Check. Do we have well timed ducking and rolling? Check. You get the idea. Without giving the ending away (You really shouldn’t care, but whatever) it also turns into a mini Zombie movie. They threw zombies into this turd, too! Jesus. This had more shitty tropes than American Horror Story. Which is also a terrible show. Fight me about it.
Tomb Raider is a terrible 2 hour unskippable cut scene for a game no one has cared about in 20 years.
While marginally more enjoyable than Red Sparrow it did not have Jennifer Lawrence naked in it, so:
