The only time this Lara seems totally at ease is when she’s joshing in one scene with a fellow female gym rat. “Or is it better for the character journey that she’s in this very threatening, all-male world?” I would have voted for more women. “Do you want more female faces onscreen, period?” screenwriter Geneva Robertson-Dworet rhetorically asked New York Times reporter Robert Ito. For at least half of the running time, she’s the only gal onscreen. Unlike Jolie’s movies, which supplied Lara with a gadget-master and a lethal comic butler as well as past lovers and frenemies, this film is basically a one-woman show. These supporting parts are as crumbly as Styrofoam.

She also gets an arch-villain, Mathias Vogel (Walton Goggins), who is trying to recover Himiko’s remains-and its world-threatening supernatural powers-for an evil association named Trinity. She acquires a gruff but loyal seaman sidekick, Lu Ren (Daniel Wu), whose own father disappeared with Lord Richard. Some unfunny things happen on the way to the tomb. It sends her scurrying to Hong Kong and then onto the remote Japanese island of Yamatai, convinced that he’s still alive and pursuing the tomb of Queen Himiko-also known as the Mother of Death. Just when Croft corporate honcho Ana Miller (Kristin Scott Thomas), Lara’s former guardian, nudges her toward the dotted line, she discovers a mind-blowing message from her father that reveals his secret life as a daredevil archeologist.

As an act of rebellion against her aristocratic past and allegiance to her dear old dad, she lives hand-to-mouth, refusing to sign papers that would certify her acceptance of his death and her inheritance of Croft Holdings. Her adored father went missing during a trip to Japan seven years earlier. We meet her as a 21-year-old bike courier in East London. If she eludes capture, the prize money will pay her back rent. When she becomes the “fox” in a “fox hunt,” there’s no innuendo-she’s just the symbolic prey in a bike contest.

Vikander’s Lara, on the other hand, is the “woke” equivalent of a tomboy with interests in cycling and kickboxing. I was not a big fan of the first Jolie film, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), but in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider-The Cradle of Life (2003), the star’s mix of campiness and gusto proved infectious: she was more fun than all three big-screen Charlie’s Angels rolled into one. The filmmakers and Vikander devote themselves to bringing the glitzy “cyberbabe” of the original video games and two Angelina Jolie movies back to earth. If the hero of this rebooted franchise were a boy, he’d be nicknamed “Chip,” as in “chip off the old block.” Instead, Lord Richard Croft (Dominic West) affectionately calls his daughter Lara (Alicia Vikander) “Sprout,” as in “a young shoot (as from a seed or root).”Ĭould she have lived up to a more vivacious moniker, like, say, “Sprite?” Maybe not.

Tomb raider actress puts on muscle