Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: Good Tomb Raider. Bad script. Run Lara, run!

You would be hard pressed to find a more perfect Lara Croft than the muscle ripply, super athletic, perfectly skin toned Alicia Vikander. And she does a pretty good job of bringing Lara Croft to the screen. Sadly, there’s not much of a story for her to work with to really shine through. What you have with “Tomb Raider” is a shoestring plot designed to progress Lara from scene to scene where she is either chasing or, much more often, being chased. Some of those scenes are pretty darned cool, like the bike chase scene at the beginning for instance, but most are of the lackluster “look at me, I’m running through the jungle!” type. What this movie really needs is Jackie Chan choreographing the chase scenes. Now THAT would be a movie well worth watching.

The progression of the movie is as follows: Lara finding herself, lots of fun! Lara going on her mission, eyerolling because every problem would have been easily solved by ubiquitous technology. Lara arriving, eyerollingly damsel in distressy, Lara finally getting down to some Tomb Raiding, enjoyable. The movie ending, wow, that was about the laziest set up for a sequel I have ever seen.

What’s equally disappointing is Vikander has some pretty solid backup and they’re wasted too. Dominic West of “The Wire” fame finally gets to use his natural British accent as Lara’s father, Richard Croft, but is pretty lackluster in the role. Then there’s the villain, Mathais Vogel, who is played by one of the greatest villain portrayers of all time, Walter Goggins, but his entire raison d’etre is diluted to “I just want to get off this island”.

In the right hands, the Vikander led “Tomb Raider” vehicle has some great promise. These are not the hands we are looking for. There is just enough enjoyment in this movie to make it passable, but there’s certainly not much to make it recommendable. Unless, of course, like the video game it’s based on, you’re just in it for Lara Croft.