Though I'm not an avid gamer, I did actually play through the 2013 video game this movie reboot seems to be based on. I'm saying "seems to be", because while there are action bits and pieces that do seem to come straight from the game, the overall story is too by-the-numbers and watered down, something the game (quite impressively penned by Rihanna Pratchett, daughter of the late Terry "Discworld" Pratchett) managed to avoid.
The movie follows young Lara on her first quest (after some introductory parts that neither make much sense in context nor explain anything beyond the most basic motivation of the characters and seem to last half of the movie but were actually much shorter ... go figure), and of course things go awry as soon as the search for her missing father starts; she falls from one danger into the next and ends up on an island together with an ill-written corporate evildoer with a motivation of "because". We get some more action - some straight from the game - and a sudden leap in Lara's expertise over the course of half a day that's neither explained nor in any way well written, and some Bruce Willis commemorative moments of "falling from high places, getting impaled, then getting better because of the power of stitches".
What we don't get from this movie is anything that made the game so great: the twists, the turns, the huge vistas, the claustrophobic caves, the constant sense of danger and urgency, the struggle against overwhelming odds; instead, it's just one Indiana Jones flashback after the other (minus anything supernatural) with actors who could do so much better had they been given anything in the script to work with. Instead they need to act out dated old scenes and pick choice straws from a hat that only contains the variations "dumb" and "more dumb".
I had hopes this would be good, mainly because the 2013 video game did so many things right and had truly memorable scenes (ugh ... just remembering the climb up the antenna still creeps me out) but this movie ... is just not good. It's average popcorn at best. I'm giving it an undeserved 5/10 and that's possibly nostalgia talking here. For a game just five years old.
The movie follows young Lara on her first quest (after some introductory parts that neither make much sense in context nor explain anything beyond the most basic motivation of the characters and seem to last half of the movie but were actually much shorter ... go figure), and of course things go awry as soon as the search for her missing father starts; she falls from one danger into the next and ends up on an island together with an ill-written corporate evildoer with a motivation of "because". We get some more action - some straight from the game - and a sudden leap in Lara's expertise over the course of half a day that's neither explained nor in any way well written, and some Bruce Willis commemorative moments of "falling from high places, getting impaled, then getting better because of the power of stitches".
What we don't get from this movie is anything that made the game so great: the twists, the turns, the huge vistas, the claustrophobic caves, the constant sense of danger and urgency, the struggle against overwhelming odds; instead, it's just one Indiana Jones flashback after the other (minus anything supernatural) with actors who could do so much better had they been given anything in the script to work with. Instead they need to act out dated old scenes and pick choice straws from a hat that only contains the variations "dumb" and "more dumb".
I had hopes this would be good, mainly because the 2013 video game did so many things right and had truly memorable scenes (ugh ... just remembering the climb up the antenna still creeps me out) but this movie ... is just not good. It's average popcorn at best. I'm giving it an undeserved 5/10 and that's possibly nostalgia talking here. For a game just five years old.