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Tomb Raider (2018)

Tomb Raider is a film following and rebooting Lara Croft's origin similar to the way the video game rebooted the video game franchise.

Directed by Roar Uthaug, awesome name. He's a relatively unknown director from Norway. It's great that companies are getting new talent to come in and direct big budget films. There isn't anything really noticeably wrong with the way the film is shot but more of the pace of the film. This is really the hardest part of making a video game film. While the game has expectations and parts where things die down a film like this needs to keep a good pace.

Alicia Vikander plays Lara Croft which does a pretty great job, performance wise. Sure the accent is different depending on which Lara you're talking about. Is it child, teenage or twenty-something Lara? Doesn't matter. She does a good job hiding her Swedish accent. She was excellent in Ex Machina and Jason Bourne. If you're a fan of the reboot video game by Square Enix, then you'll be happy with her portrayal.

Daniel Wu plays Lu Ren who is a companion of Lara's much like in the game she has friends that are elsewhere throughout most of the game/movie. I liked that aspect and he does a decent job. You might recognize him from Geostrom, a film I do not recommend, but he is probably better known as Gul'dan from Warcraft and Hearthstone.

Walton Goggins, awesome name, plays the antagonist of the film Mathias Vogel. He's beginning to get typecast as a villain which isn't necessarily a bad thing in this case. His best performance as a villain is as Boyd Crowder in Justified. He's also in Maze Runner, and an HBO show called Vice Principals. His character is typical of a Tomb Raider game and for that, I'll give props.

The problem really with the film, that prevents it from being really good, is that it's a harder sell to the movie-going audience a small spice of fantasy in an otherwise grounded film. I enjoyed this more than I did the other two Tomb Raider films.

Result: B (It's good, and for a video game film that's phenomenal.)
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