Kurt Loder Reviews Tomb Raider: New at Reason

Fresh out of the action factory though it may be, the new Tomb Raider is already ripe to be remade – as a better movie. A movie that would more stylishly recycle the Indiana Jones readymades at the heart of its video-game DNA, and use them for something more dynamic than set dressing. A movie that would take some Indy tips about creating memorable secondary characters. An improved film would also hack down the thick underbrush of exposition, structure the narrative more gracefully, and—this is important!—assign somebody to turn on the lights during midnight mud-fight scenes.

The director, Norwegian genre specialist Roar Uthaug, is a pro and he does some things well (the action editing is pretty snappy throughout). But he also makes some puzzling choices. The movie begins with a bit of voiceover mumbo-jumbo about an evil Japanese queen named Himiko, who was long ago entombed on the “lost island of Yamatai” and is just “waiting to be unleashed.” Fine—great, in fact: who doesn’t love this sort of stuff, writes Kurt Loder.

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