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score 3/10
Tomb Raider has got to be one of the most boring and by-the-numbers action/adventure films I have ever seen a long while. I don't think I came this close to falling asleep during a movie since The Last Witch Hunter.
The main actress was good but not great, I'll admit, but everyone else was serviceable at best and nothing to write home about. Except Nick Frost as the Pawn shop clerk. He was pretty cool.
However, the characters were utterly uninteresting and boring. Lara is every boring missing-parent protagonist rolled into one bland package. When I first heard that the mother died, I nearly facepalmed, in utter disbelief that it is 2018 and we are still putting the bare minimum effort into our video game adaptations. Both the Father and villain feel like they just took character templates from better movies and made no effort to flesh them out or make them unique.
The story was, you guessed it, a bore. Everything up until they reach the island felt like generic filler that was lifted from better movies and really should have been cut down. It did not help make me any more invested in this character. The rest of the movie plays out like a EXTREMELY watered down and childishly predictable Indiana Jones side quest with none of the charm, wit, or intrigue.
The action was unremarkable. Not good, but not bad either. Nothing memorable or noteworthy. Ditto for the soundtrack.
The only aspect of this film that even remotely caught my interest was the revelation that Himiko's "death powers" was actually a very fatal disease for which she was a carrier, and that she actually sacrificed herself to protect her people (contrary to the myth where she was an evil witch who was entombed by her own generals). Plot points involving the supernatural having rational explanations in grounded-in-reality films do interest me. This feels like the only element in the movie that had any effort or thought put into it.
But upon learning that this was NOT the case in the video game this movie was based on, but rather from an entirely separate franchise altogether, I could not help but laugh at the irony. I guess the actual concept from the video game was too "original and risky" for these filmmakers?
All and all, Tomb Raider was a boring and cliche-ridden chore of a film that plays it completely safe and makes no effort to set itself apart from any number of adventure films and video game adaptions. It's literally a bunch of cookie-cutter template characters taking part in a cookie-cutter template adventure without an original bone in its limp body. I have never played the game that this film is based on, but if it really is as bad as this film, then it will probably stay that way.
3/10.
Feature_Length 18 March 2018
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw4096299/ |
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21-11-2019 06:21:56
