On An Adventure With The Tomb Raider

Good day my friends! I hope you are all doing well today and have been having a great week so far enjoying the start of spring. Man it's hard to believe that it is spring already! This year seems to be flying by so fast, in fact as I look at the calendar on my phone I can see that we are almost at the end of March. Now as a movie fan and frequent visitor to the theatre over the years I have noticed that in a this month you don't usually get many blockbusters. You get some decent movies but nothing really over spectacular until you reach May or sometimes at the end of the month. This is the lull period that happens before the kick off of the big summer blockbuster season which was announced earlier this month that it will start earlier this year with Avengers: Infinity War rolling out in theatres on April 27th. But that's a story for a different time you are here for this weeks movie review. Now I have seen over the years and especially most recently that Hollywood has had this new trend to take past movie franchises and reboot them. Now I understand that it is all about making a profit and most times a movie gets rushed out too quickly. And sometimes the movies are good well this week we are looking at yet another reboot. This week we take a look at one of those movies with the reboot of Tomb Raider with Oscar winner Alicia Vikander(Jason Bourne) taking on the role of Lara Croft which was done back in the early 2000's by another Oscar winner and Brad Pitts ex wife Angelina Jolie. This movie also stars Dominic West(300) as Lord Richard Croft, Walton Goggins(The Hateful Eight) as Mathias Vogel, Daniel Wu(Warcraft) as Lu Ren and Kristen Scott Thomas(The English Patient) as Ana Miller. So let us just see is this reboot worth it or not.

Seven years ago when Lara(Vikander) was just a teenager her father Lord Richard Croft(West) went in search of a lost island of the Japanese coast in search of the tomb of Empress Himko also known as The Mother Of Death. He went there not to open the tomb but to keep an organization known as Trinity from opening it and unleashing the death and destruction that Himko was foretold to bring if her tomb was opened and she is released. A powerful weapon in Trinity's quest for world domination. Richard left and never came back and Lara now in her twenties refuses to sign the papers declaring him legally dead and claiming her vast inheritance and her fathers company. In fact she lives practically penniless as a bike courier in the London streets on her wits, ingenuity, high intelligence and determination. And one day after having to be bailed out of jail by Ana Miller(Scott Thomas) a high ranking executive at her fathers company and family friend she decides to finally sign the papers. It is there that she discovers a puzzle that her father left for her in his belongings willed to her that leads her to discover a secret room in a family crypt and that her father was more than a businessman. He instructs her to burn all his research on Himko but she instead takes the information to find the island and what happened to her father. Her search will have her go to an island in the middle of The Devil's Sea on a boat captained by Lu Ren whose father disappeared along with Lara's father. Shipwrecked on the island they find that a man named Vogel(Goggins) who has been working for Trinity has been on the island on for 7 years along with his heavily armed soldiers and a slave labor force they are using to find the tomb. They get the break they need in Richards journal which Lara brought with her. Lara escapes their clutches and comes to a shocking discovery and the realization that she must stop Trinity and seal the tomb of The Mother Of Death forever and become the woman she was meant to be.

Well that's what it is about! What do you think? I know you would have to see it! And you are saying this is what we are here for to find out how it was! Well let me tell you this for a movie based on a video game it wasn't half bad! It wasn't great though. I found it lagged in parts and the antagonists of Vogel and Trinity could have been much better developed. The story was good though for a movie based on a video game which as we have seen in the past have really been weak and lackluster. I do have to say that I liked the back story of Lara better here and Alicia Vikander did a great job. Her Lara Croft was more fierce, intelligent and tough. In fact I liked her in this role better than Angelina Jolie's Lara Croft. This was an action movie that actually tried to have more of a story than a just mindless action. Overall it had some decent acting and story but did manage to lull a bit. I do have to admit that I didn't look at my watch at all to wonder when it was over but still was wondering when they would ever get into the tomb. The movie was better than I thought it would be but not great and could have been a little better. That is why I am giving this movie a 6.8 on The Justin Scale Of Movies and having to put it on the Flick-It pile of movies to wait to see when it reaches DVD. And I guess that is a wrap here on my latest movie review. Until next time, keep that popcorn freshly popped and save me a good seat because I will be seeing you again at the movies!