In the red corner, from Warner Bros. Pictures, its budget weighing in at $94 million, starring an Academy Award winner and based on a legendary video game franchise, we have... Tomb Raider!
And in the blue corner, from Entertainment Studios Motion Pictures, its budget weighing in at $35 million, starring that bratty blonde from Lost and based on shoddy Hollywood science and laughable Southern accents, we have... The Hurricane Heist!
The obvious winner... is actually not so obvious.
Tomb Raider (2018)
Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, and for some language
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Score: 2 out of 5
Seventeen years ago, Hollywood tried to adapt Tomb Raider, already by then one of the biggest franchises in video games, to the big screen. Titled Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, the film wasn't particularly great, but it did boast perfect casting in the form of a promising young actress named Angelina Jolie. Her charisma and ferocity as the treasure-seeking adventurer Lara Croft helped carry the whole thing, making for one of the better-remembered video game adaptations while elevating Jolie to the A-list and Lara from merely a popular video game heroine to the status of an icon alongside Mario and Sonic. Since then, the franchise has had its ups and downs over the years, with the film franchise going cold with the sequel The Cradle of Life in 2003 and the game series having been rebooted twice. The second reboot, a gritty "back to basics" story released in 2013 that featured a young, untested Lara as basically Katniss Everdeen meets John McClane, met rave reviews and sales to match, and it is this version that serves as the basis for this latest attempt at bringing Lara to the big screen, swapping out Jolie for a new rising star in Alicia Vikander.
And all around, it's a serviceable action-adventure movie. Nothing more, nothing less. Vikander is without a doubt the highlight, but she's virtually the only thing keeping it from sinking into mediocrity, my main thought at many moments being that I could be playing a better version of this movie on my PlayStation. The action scenes were paint-by-numbers, characters made numerous dumb decisions that seemingly existed only to drive the story forward, and overall, it felt more like a demo reel for a Tomb Raider movie or for Vikander as an action star than anything else. That said, it never turned outright unbearable to watch, and frequently showed enough flashes of inspiration to keep me interested. I left the theater thinking that this movie was just decent, but hoping to see a better version of it in the future.
The story here is that, seven years ago, Lara Croft's father Richard (Dominic West) went missing on a trip to Asia. Nowadays, she's a 21-year-old bike courier in London struggling to make ends meet, yet is still deeply resistant to the idea of signing her father's will and collecting a substantial inheritance, as that would mean admitting that he is dead. After her caretaker Ana Miller (Kristin Scott Thomas) finally prods her into doing so after some trouble with the law, she soon learns that her father lived a secret life as a treasure hunter, racing to stay one step ahead of an Illuminati-esque organization called Trinity. Specifically, he went missing in the "Devil's Triangle" off of East Asia searching for the island of Yamatai, home to the tomb of an ancient queen named Himiko who is said to bear a curse that could destroy the world -- and Trinity hopes to use this as a weapon. Lara sets out for Yamatai to find her father, together with a Chinese boat captain named Lu Ren (Daniel Wu) who Lara thinks may know something about Richard's whereabouts, only for the both of them to get shipwrecked on the island in a storm. There, Lara must battle Mathias Vogel (Walton Goggins), a Trinity operative who is also leading a team to search for the tomb, in order to find it first and keep whatever is inside out of Trinity's hands, while also holding out hope that Richard may still be alive.
Knowing what they changed from the 2013 game to the movie, particularly as far as the third act is concerned, probably made me notice some plot holes that a casual moviegoer who's never played the game. That said, I won't go into much detail here, because a) I prefer to hold back on spoilers unless they're really necessary for me to explain my thoughts on a film, and b) because, when you get right down to it, the plot here is very thin all around. It's basically a "greatest hits" collection of moments from the games, taking the broad strokes of one game's storyline and compressing it down to just under two hours. I've heard it described by another critic as less an adaptation of the game and more an adaptation of its launch trailer, replicating the imagery from it without much of the substance. Lara too is a mess of often contradictory character traits, depicted as street-smart in the opening in London but naive enough to fall for an obvious trick at the hands of muggers in Hong Kong, and while Alicia Vikander is able to sell them all, they're not enough to build an interesting character around as opposed to an action figure or a player avatar. The only consistent characterization she gets is when it comes to her love of her father, and perhaps not surprisingly, it was here where I was most interested in Lara as a character. I suspect that the script went through several different rewrites at the hands of different, uncredited writers, all under pressure from both the studio and Square Enix (the current publisher of the games who also produced this movie) to throw in as many "money shots" and allusions to the games as possible, and overall, it produced a mess.
The action isn't much to write home about either. It was about as rote and workmanlike as possible, falling victim to every pet peeve I have with modern action filmmaking, and while it was still easier to follow than the average Paul W. S. Anderson or Olivier Megaton flick, it still wasn't all that impressive. Shootouts, fistfights, and chase scenes are staged decently, but are often plagued by the sort of jump cuts and shaky cam that have plagued too many recent action movies, and never did the film go above and beyond and provide an action scene, or even a breathtaking vista, worth writing home about. I get that not every modern action movie can, or even should, be John Wick or Mad Max: Fury Road. But here, it often felt like director Roar Uthaug put in only the barest minimum of effort to make the visuals compelling. The action scenes worked, generally, but I can't tell you anything about any of them beyond the most basic descriptions. "Oh, here's Lara chasing after some goons who stole her bag. Now here she is getting into a hand-to-hand fight. And here are Trinity's enslaved miners staging an escape with Lara and Lu Ren's help."
The cast was really what kept this movie enjoyable. Alicia Vikander has to play a whole bunch of different takes on Lara that don't really mesh together, but at every point, she is a pro. She nails the look (even without Lara's famously huge... tracts of land), and while the writing gives her little to work with in terms of building an actual character, she more than has the chops to back it up. Whatever else went wrong with the making of this movie, the casting of Vikander as Lara wasn't one of them; while the sequel-teasing ending may have been a bit annoying, it definitely got me excited to see a better sequel that allows her to truly shine. The people around her were all good, but the big surprise out of the cast was the Chinese-American actor Daniel Wu. It's clear that he was cast in this movie to get it into Chinese theaters, but his presence was welcome either way, the man exuding leading-man charisma that reminded me of Chris Pratt or George Clooney. Even though his subplot felt barely connected to the main story after the halfway mark, he still kept things interesting when Vikander wasn't onscreen. I definitely wouldn't mind seeing him in more American films.
The Bottom Line
This wasn't all that great, but it has its moments. Regardless, I'd recommend waiting for Netflix or on-demand if you're planning to see this, since there are better films like it in theaters right now.
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Right after watching Tomb Raider, I was wondering whether to give it a 2 or a 3 out of 5, as I didn't particularly like it but didn't hate it either. Then I saw my second movie of the day...
The Hurricane Heist (2018)
Rated PG-13 for sequences of gun violence, action, destruction, language and some suggestive material
Score: 3 out of 5
No, I'm not crazy, nor did I make a typo. I'm giving this piece of hot garbage a higher score than Tomb Raider, despite it being, on many levels, an objectively worse film. Whereas Tomb Raider never dipped below basic standards of competence, this film doesn't wait five minutes before it lets you know precisely what it's all about by putting a literal demonic face in the clouds of a hurricane. The special effects work looked unfinished, like a slightly gussied-up version of a direct-to-video film. The geography was incredibly inconsistent, as were the accents, to the point where I couldn't tell if the main villain, an Irishman named Perkins, was actually supposed to be Irish, his accent was so close to those of the so-called "Southerners" in the film. The science was a joke. The setting is a town in Alabama called Gulfport, even though the real Gulfport is a state over in Mississippi, and in any case the film was shot in Bulgaria (hence why there are mountains on the Gulf Coast). The production values absolutely reeked of its low budget. That said, film reviews are subjective, not objective. And I subjectively had a blast watching this movie. Everybody involved seemed like they knew exactly what they were making, and acted accordingly. It is a film that, right down to its self-explanatory title, is incredibly unpretentious about what it is. It advertises a mix of a cheesy disaster flick and a cheesy heist flick, the trailer employing the obvious '80s hair metal hit for its soundtrack, and it delivers exactly what it promises.
The plot is literally right there in the title: a hurricane is about to hit Gulfport, Alabama, and some criminals, led by the US Treasury employee Connor Perkins and assisted by a pair of European hackers and some corrupt local cops, use the opportunity to rob a US Treasury facility where old, worn-out dollar bills are shredded and removed from circulation, hoping for a haul of $600 million. Arrayed to stop them are three people: ATF agent Casey Corvin (Maggie Grace), who was reassigned to the facility after an unexplained incident in Utah, meteorologist Dr. Will Rutledge (Toby Kebbell), who is in town to track the hurricane and take measurements, and Will's brother Breeze (Ryan Kwanten), an auto mechanic, generator repairman, former Marine, and layabout drunk who, as it turns out, the robbers need in order to get the vault open after the storm cuts the power. Will and Breeze have a backstory about watching their father die in Hurricane Andrew, but for all that it's mentioned between them, it strangely has little impact on the actual story.
Objectively, this is not a good movie. The trailer advertises it as coming from the director of The Fast and the Furious and xXx, but Rob Cohen is a long way from those movies here. Lacking the special effects budget for a truly all-out disaster flick, he instead made something similar to the 1998 thriller Hard Rain, using rain and wind machines to goose up the car chases and shootouts with flying debris and flash floods. One of the highlights comes when Will, realizing that he's upwind from some goons shooting at him and has access to a big pile of hubcaps, starts throwing them into the wind like giant shurikens until he hits them, while another scene in a shopping mall uses an indoor/outdoor "pressure inversion" in a way that starts by making an utter mockery of meteorological science and the laws of physics. Where the film is at its best, however, is with the stuntwork. It's here where the Fast and the Furious influence really shines through, particularly during the finale when we get our heroes jumping between semi trucks in a scene that was genuinely thrilling. If you're looking for logic, you've come to the wrong place. If, however, you wanna see a hurricane smash some stuff, this is your ticket.
And just like Cohen, the cast is equally aware of just what sort of movie they're making. Maggie Grace's Casey is introduced to us using a semi truck full of money to first push through a traffic jam and then drive over a tobacco field on her way to the Treasury facility, remarking in the latter case that she's probably saving people from dying of lung cancer, and I knew right away that I was going to love her. She was clearly relishing playing this sort of B-movie action hero, dropping one-liners and seeming like she's having all the fun in the world in the part. Oddly enough, over the course of this film Grace looked more convincingly beat-up than Vikander did in Tomb Raider; whereas Vikander had some dirt and scrapes on her face and a bandage over her arm but otherwise still looked ready for a photoshoot, Grace's face gets covered in blood, cuts, and bruises right alongside those of Toby Kebbell and Ryan Kwanten. Speaking of, those two were a pair of charmers as well. Neither is a native of the South or even the United States (they're English and Australian, respectively), and it's easy enough to tell, but they play their accents for a level of knowing camp value while mouthing off to each other, Casey, and the robbers at various points. Ralph Ineson, who I most recently saw in a legitimately good movie in The Witch, hams it up to a glorious degree as the villainous Perkins. His relationships with the other robbers are never really fleshed out, such that I didn't get why he was supposed to be upset when one of them in particular got killed until it was explained that she was his girlfriend, but it was still a joy watching him, especially at the very end. (I won't spoil what happens, but only because it's too funny.)
The Bottom Line
It's odd. Tomb Raider is a movie I recommended waiting to rent or stream, while this is a movie that felt like it was destined to go direct-to-video and mistakenly got a theatrical release instead. But I don't regret seeing it one bit. It is a bad movie, but it is an unapologetic one that compels you to enjoy it anyway, the right mix of winking camp and genuine fun that hits the same sweet spot as San Andreas except on a lower budget. I predict this to be rediscovered and have a long lifespan in those sorts of moviegoing circles.
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