"Oi! Where's yer Tomb Raidin' loicense?"
Lara Croft's bland & canned 'adventure' fails as an adaptation of the original (reboot) video game, drawing towards an unsatsifactory close because the writing crew abandons 3 of the 5 Pillars.
The movie begins with an interesting scene of Croft training in a boxing ring, then an unnecessary pair of scenes of her -not (?) delivering (multicultural!) food as her day job and an "edgy" bike race through London. (Ideas on why this was done later.) The race ends in the typical "hero getting bailed out by a mentor" (Literally. She ran afoul of an "Oi! Where's your Biking through London to techno music loicense?").
Turns out she's run from her family fortune because, to get her hands on it, she would have to come to terms with her father as Dead. I've nothing wrong with a character being 'Daddy's Girl'. Some of the best heroines in fiction from Elizabeth Bennet to Rally Vincent to (Hey! Let's tie this in with the opening image!) Ayra Stark share the trait of identifying with and adopting the traits of their fathers.
Almost about to sign the papers, she impulsively takes an old puzzle from her solicitor's hand and unlocks a key that distracts her from her legal duties and vast fortune, and uncovers her father's secret quest to A) reveal the existence of The Supernatural and B) Stop bad guy organization Trinity from exploiting the supernatural for world domination.
With clues to her father's last known location in hand, Lara pawns off a jade pendant given to her by her father to a pawn broker played by Nick Frost and travels to Hong Kong to pick up her requisite Cheynese supporting character Lu Ren (Daniel Wu). Her bag gets stolen, there's a chase scene, a Hong Kong sailor inexplicably has a shotgun on his boat. She gradually convinces him to take her to the island of Yamatai, and the actual plot finally begins in earnest.
Okay, if those last four paragraphs, asides aside, seemed like bloat in this article, it's because it is. Ever notice in reviews where someone points out, "One line of dialog could have explained away this plothole!"? Here it's the exact opposite. Nearly the first third of the film was spent setting up stuff that could have been ignored to begin with.
Think about Tom Raider (2013). The video game itself begins at the moment the shipwreck on Yamatai island. What took the Tomb Raider (2018) movie an entire first act to get to was done in a few minutes of dialog, and there only the dialog that set up Lara's need to be out there with a College Professor, some coeds, a tv crew and some of her father's old friends & hirelings. The plot relevant action was hit on as soon as possible, partly because an origin story to an origin story is redundant.
Five Pillars Review
Action: No problems here, as when the movie actually starts half an hour in, beatings, shootings, narrow escapes abound, many of them reflective of the action from the 2013 video game. -However-
Impact: None. Absolutely none, as while the video game had the stakes of her friend Samantha Nishimura's survival, Lara having to deal with the potential loss of that extended family of her father's compatriots & staff, none of these characters are present as such in the movie. We know for a fact that Lara will walk away from this, and Lu Ren has so little screentime before the action kicks into high gear, that there's no emotional investment in him, or any of the dozens of men washed up on Yamatai island who Trinity have conscripted into doing the heavy lifting for them.
Worse yet, after all is said & done, both Lara & Trinity are at a null-state. Lara may have stopped one of their likely many plots, but Trinity may now have a more direct upper hand. In addition, Lara's actions have no impact on the greater world as a whole. Unlike her inspiration of Indiana Jones, she has no interesting & unique archaeological discovery to place in a museum (because It Belongs in a Museum), no revelation about the world's history to that will sadly appeal to only a handful of academic grognards scattered around the world. Her adventure is a wash.
Moral Peril None. No drama is presented by the potential of Lara having an earnest moral crisis, nor is she honestly presented with any temptation. Her daddy issues aside, this Lara is genuinely flat character with little internal drive that her enemies could use to exploit her. This is even though she's presented as having an almost compulsive need to solve puzzles.
Romance Of course not. The steamy tropics remain sexless once again in the era of the modern stronk empowered wammen. Jesus, do none of these people remember Romancing the Stone, arguably one of the best movies of all time? The one with an award named after the screenwriter? Daniel Wu is a handsome enough guy> What the hell would it have been like if the first third of this movie had centered on him and Lara on his boat on the way out? Her as this mysterious young woman who's dad knew his? We'd known Lara is the real star here, but she'd be presented as a cypher herself. Add the tension of a gradual "will they or won't they?" and it wouldn't matter if they did or not.
Mystery Tragically, not much. The movie ends up invoking the trope of Doing in the Wizard (one of the worst of all tropes.) And the reason, I believe, is:
CHEYNA
You can't help but notice that Chinese is the only language being spoken outside of English on this arguably Japanese island. The supporting cash of a 1-Child Policy nation guarantees that Lara will remain prudishly sexless for the International Audience. (A feature she shares with MaRey Sue.) There is no supernatural, no ghosts, no god, because religion is the opiate of the masses. And these aren't bugs dragging down the film into blandness, these are pay for play features.
Any model to track the lack of flavor in modern cinema that refuses to incorporate the factor that American cinema is no longer American will also fail to understand the full nature of the problem. Nor can many in that Nostalgia™ crowd recognize a culture that was lost (surrendered) less than 3 decades ago, nor recreate what not only made the fiction of an era past so evocative & lasting, but what made American cinema the standard the rest of the world aspired to.