Tomb Raider

You might expect a movie called Tomb Raider to have characters who spend a great deal of time robbing or at least looking into ancient tombs of some kind.  Unforunately, in this case you would be very wrong!  Tomb Raider plods on for 1 1/2 hours before we ever see the inside of a tomb.  Up until that point, Oscar winning actress Alicia Vikander, as Lara Kroft, spends an excrusiately long time seting up the story.  Nothing much happens until she FINALLY gets to the forgotten island of Yamatai and finds her long lost father, who had disappeared when she was a child, chasing a rather lame legend about a terrifying Japanese goddess imprisoned in the tomb.  Here she does have some exciting adventures, uses her boxing skills to get beat up a lot, runs like a demon and solves a few puzzles.  She does free a bunch of shanghaied sailors, forced to dig for the tomb, but they don’t really figure much in the story, which is resolved in a rather unrealisitc fashion. I thought Walton Goggins made a good, if somewhat stereotypical, villan and Dominc West was fine as her father.  I loved Daniel Wu as Laura’s traveling companion; he  was the most charismatic of them all.  I never saw the first Tomb Raider with Angelina Jolie, so I have no idea if this reboot is better or worse.  If I were you, I would go see Black Panther again, or better yet, wait for Infinity War – it should be out a theatre near you very soon!