Sandy Kenyon reviews 'Tomb Raider' reboot
Lara Croft was born as a character in a video game, and her first movie grossed a quarter of a billion dollars around the world. Seventeen years after the original reached theaters, Hollywood figures it's time for a reboot.
Alicia Vikander is not yet 30 years old and already an Oscar winner. She's a star of foreign films trying to take her career to the next level in the same franchise that launched Angelina Jolie into the stratosphere.
To re-introduce this alpha female to another generation, there is plenty of back story here. We meet the future Tomb Raider as a bike messenger living in London after her father's disappearance years before.
As his sole heir, it's in her best interest to sign the papers that'll declare him legally dead so she can inherit his vast fortune.
Instead, she figures he's just disappeared and goes in search of him following clues he's left behind.
After a treacherous journey, she finds the tomb -- but unfortunately, a bad guy played by Walt Goggins beat her to it.
"Tomb Raider" is a thinking person's action movie, but I missed Angelina's stardom: her commanding presence.
So did guest critic Fletch, a young movie fan from Manhattan. Fletch prefers the original and said this one just "tries too hard" with too many "twists."
Twists I won't reveal. I appreciated an action movie that is less explicitly violent than most. Vikander's acting is also more interesting than average, but her star power is not quite enough to carry an entire movie like this on her shoulders.
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