Tag: t

Teenage Hooker Becomes a Killing Machine

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★★
“Why, yes – yes, she does…”

You’ll understand why, when skimming leisurely through a streaming channel on the Roku, I screeched to a halt at this title. Even though the “official” English title is just Killing Machine, I knew I immediately had to watch it. Yet, while the title technically reflects what happens, it’s a masterly bait-and-switch. For instead of the expected grindhouse apocalypse, it’s far more arty and surreal. The word “Lynchian” is likely over-used, yet it’s hard to argue its accuracy here. If David Lynch had been contractually obligated to deliver a movie with this title, it’d perhaps have looked very similar.

The synopsis is about what you’d expect. The nameless schoolgirl prostitute (Lee) is caught turning tricks by her teacher (D-t Kim), and the pair start a relationship. But when she becomes pregnant and declares her love to him, he decides the best way out is, with the help of a few friends, to convert her into a cyborg killer for hire. Except, in a Robocop-like twist, she proves capable of breaking her programming, and turns her new found talents (including a machine-gun, mounted in a place machine-guns were never intended to go) on those who created her.

All of which still sounds a lot of fun. Except, trust me, it’s not, and it’s clearly not intended to be. Nam is interested more in Creating Art, with a capital A. This is apparent right from the beginning, which opens with the credits, running very slowly, backwards. They run again, in a forward direction, at the end; this pretension seems like unnecessary padding in a film which (perhaps mercifully) only runs 58 minutes, including about ten minutes for both sets of credits. It’s a lurid, shot on video nightmare, that takes place in a back-alley world, where the lighting is perpetually neon-harsh, and there’s always a hip soundtrack, ranging from Ryuichi Sakamoto to the Gypsy Kings.

It almost feels like an hour-long performance art prank at the audience’s expense, not least given the amount of time devoted to characters laughing hysterically for no apparent reason. Nam seems to feel that anything worth doing is worth overdoing, in the sense that virtually every scene continues well past the point where it has worn out its welcome or point. Yet it’s clear he knows his B-movies: for instance, the heroine’s first mission is obviously inspired, almost to the point of plagiarism, by the one in Nikita. It’s as if the director was going, “Well, I could give you what you expected… Nah. Let’s not. Instead, here’s another scene of the bad guys laughing hysterically for no apparent reason.”

I will say this for it. You will not have seen anything like Killing Machine before, and I will remember the movie, when most other films reviewed for this site have long been forgotten. However, neither of these points are necessarily a good thing. The joke’s on the viewer here.

Dir: Gee-woong Nam
Star: So-yun Lee, Dae-tong Kim, Soo-baek Bae, Ho-kyum Kim

Tarnation

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★★½
“The Dead Evil.”

Following on after From Parts Unknown and Sheborg Apocalypse, this is my third encounter with what Armstrong calls “Neo pulp.” All three have strong heroines at their core, which is something I can get behind. But I suspect his approach works best when he builds out his own universe, as in Sheborg. Here, the inspiration is the classic horror of The Evil Dead trilogy (particularly Evil Dead 2), which is a bit of a double-edged sword. You need to have seen those films to get the references – and, in Armstrong’s defense, I suspect most viewers of his work likely will have. The problem, and there’s no escaping this, is Sam Raimi did it better, leaving this feeling almost like an Asylum-style mockbuster. Turning Ash into Ashette and hanging an Evil Dead poster on the wall of your cabin isn’t enough.

Most obviously, Masterman isn’t Bruce Campbell. While fine in Sheborg as the sidekick, she doesn’t have the presence necessary to drag the viewer along on her journey to a blood-drenched hell and back. Oscar (Masterman) is a wannabe singer, fired by her band, who heads off to a remote cabin with her best friend and friend’s boyfriend. Of course, anyone who has ever seen any horror movie will be unsurprised when things go wrong, in particular her BFF being possessed by some kind of entity. Though there’s a lot of… stuff going on besides. Said stuff includes a flying demon with a unicorn’s head, a boxing kangaroo, a rap battle, and insects crawling out of places insects were never meant to go. And blood. Lots of blood.

There’s no arguing the energy here: when the film gets going, it pretty much doesn’t stop thereafter. However, I’d have traded a sizeable chunk of that energy for coherence. Or a sense of escalation. Or anything to help negate the feeling this consists of Armstrong and his team throwing whatever ideas they could come up with, on the screen, in the order they came up with them. Some of those ideas are fun, and you marvel at the low budget inventiveness. which makes a hole in the floor with a rug on it, a portal to the netherworld. Others don’t work, outstay their welcome, or have execution so flawed they should have been strangled at birth.

As a result, the energy becomes increasingly wearing on the soul, to the point that Oscar discovering the magic words to restore normality are, “Klaatu Barada Necktie,” provoked a tired eye-roll rather than the intended mirth. As loving recreations go, it’s certainly not bad; however, if I wanted to watch a blood-spattered story about a weekend spent at a cabin in the woods gone horribly wrong, I’d watch The Evil Dead and its sequels. Hopefully, Armstrong can develop something that shows off his unquestionable talent, imagination and ability to squeeze every penny out of the budget, on its own canvas, rather than painting on top of someone else’s masterpiece.

Dir: Daniel Armstrong
Star: Daisy Masterman, Emma Louise Wilson, Danae Swinburne

Tomboy

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★★½
“Female empowerment! (And boobs)”

Crown International were an independent movie studio, who operated from the sixties through the eighties: we’ve covered some of their work before, such as Policewomen and Malibu High. While specializing mostly in drive-in fare, they did occasionally break out, and this was one of their bigger hits: it reached #5 in the box-office on its opening weekend [during Beverly Hills Cop‘s run of thirteen straight weeks at #1; it was a different theatrical universe then!]. Which is kinda odd: it’s a frothy concoction that’s both ahead of its time, in a no-nonsense heroine who takes crap from nobody, and remarkably retro in its gratuitous (and inevitably female) nudity.

Russell plays Tomasina “Tommy” Boyd, the daughter of an astronaut, who is great at sport, and works as a car mechanic. Nobody particularly takes her talents seriously, and if there’s a theme here, it’s of Tommy having repeatedly to prove herself in the facing of those who doubt her. One of the customers at the garage where she works is millionaire scion Ernie Leeds Jr. (Douglas, Kirk’s son), whose family sponsors racing driver Randy Starr (DiNome). Tommy has long had a crush on Randy, but discovers he can be a bit of a dick, and certainly won’t accept she’s every bit as good as him on the track – unless she can prove it by beating him

It takes quite some time for that plot to show up, and until it does, the scenes of Tommy getting one up on the local male chauvinist sleazeballs are lightly amusing, although possess all the weight of a soap-bubble. These angles are a bit at odds with the nudity, mostly courtesy of Tommy’s ditzy friend, Seville (Somers), who wants to be a movie star – though her career here appears to consist of not much more than a donut commercial. Russell’s most memorable contribution to the exploitation, is when she falls into a river on a date with Randy. She changes her top in front of him, with a complete lack of self-consciousness that’s as much laudable as erotic.

This has got to be one of the flimsiest theatrical vehicles I’ve ever seen, and criticizing it is like trying to punch a cloud of steam: “fluff” doesn’t even begin to do justice to its lack of weight. I’ve no clue who was the intended audience here. Tommy’s arc of self-confidence and personal discovery would be suitable for something on the Lifetime Channel – or even Disney. Yet the gratuitous flesh is aimed right for the wheel-house of a teenage male audience, who would presumably not exactly be captivated by the more empowering aspects. Maybe this makes it the ultimate date movie, with something for both halves to appreciate?

Somehow, though, it did find an audience, taking $14.1 million, over $36 million in 2018 prices – not bad for a film, which rather obviously didn’t cost a great deal to make (for comparison, Brazil, released the same year, took just under $10 million). This is certainly one of those cases where you can say, “They don’t make ’em like this any more.” Whether that’s a bad thing or not, I’m less sure.

Dir: Herb Freed
Star: Betsy Russell, Jerry DiNome, Kristi Somers, Eric Douglas

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Tigresses

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★★★
“A woman’s grudge can make the snow fall in summer!”

After their parents are killed by Ji-Gyeum Yoon (Kim Y-i), who wants to take over their father Sung’s position, sisters Su-Yung and An-Yung are split up and sent off for their safely, each owning half of a jade pendant. Fifteen years later, An-Yung (Shang Kwan) begins to take her vengeance on the usurper – not just physically, but also waging psychological warfare, sending him notes to ensure he knows he is being targeted, although not initially why or who. Though I’m a little surprised Yoon doesn’t figure it out immediately, given he’s still so paranoid about Sung’s daughters coming out, he freaks out when left alone with a maid, stating the position given in the tag-line above.

Yoon responds to An-Yung’s requests for a meeting by sending his bodyguards out to take her down. She defeats them, despite their interesting range of special powers – one can hypnotize with his gaze, another turns invisible, and a third can shoot an apparently endless jet of flame from his mouth. He must be popular at barbecues: I guess this either inspired Dhalsim’s special power in Street Fighter II or, probably more likely, shares a common origin with it. Fortunately, An-Yung’s talents include being a human fire extinguisher. Eventually, having run out of minions, Yoon hires a nomadic fighter (Kim J-N) to replace them, a black-clad warrioress, whose skills are the equal of An-Yung’s. If you can’t figure out who this mysterious anti-heroine is, you clearly have not seen enough kung-fu films. Particularly, ones about separated sisters… Similarly, you won’t be surprise to learn that, once the truth comes out (remember that jade pendant?), Yoon’s new employee switches sides.

The film focuses mostly on An-Yung, which makes it somewhat strange that she isn’t the one who gets to take the final revenge. Perhaps this is to make up for her getting the lion’s share of the fighting over the first 75 minutes? It’s mostly in the latter stages that we really get to see Shang Kwan to best effect; for earlier on, it seems that most of her action scenes seem to involve her wearing a hood, a mask or a really large hat. All of which – while concealing her character’s identity, so making sense in the story – also potentially conceal the actress being doubled, leaving it difficult to be sure exactly whose skills are on display.

Still, there’s just about enough going on with her face on display to be worthy of credit. The pace is quick enough to be entertaining, although the structure is wonky, with a bunch of stuff I didn’t understand until I read a YouTube synopsis, such as that Yoon is a local magistrate. Not that this matters, since the film works competently enough as a straightforward revenge pic, even if the two sisters subplot is similarly forgotten for much of the time, and is arguably little more significant than Yoon being a magistrate. A decent showcase for one of the second tier of seventies action heroines from the Far East. Just not to be confused with another Polly Shang Kwan film, A Girl Called Tigress.

Dir: Lee Hyeok-Su
Star: Polly Shang Kwan, Kim Jeong-Nan, Choe Bong, Kim Young-in

Terminal

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★★★½
“Style wars.”

Oozing with a unique visual style that’s like a brutalist cross between Blade Runner and Alice in Wonderland, this focuses on a battle for business between assassins. Annie (Robbie) – or, maybe, she’s called Bonnie – wants to take over the murderous commissions of the mysterious Mr. Franklin. He agrees, only if she takes out the current incumbents, Vince (Fletcher) and his apprentice, Alfred (Irons). Simultaneously, while working as a waitress in an all-night diner at a railway station, she meets Bill (Pegg), a terminally-ill English teacher, who enters her establishment while waiting for a train in front of which to throw himself.

This was ferociously slagged off by many critics, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone calling it, “one of the worst movies ever made.” [Mind you, as the man after whom eFilmCritic named their Quote Whore of the Year award, all his opinions should be taken accordingly…] It’s certainly not that bad, though having stumbled across it on Hulu, our investment in it was strictly limited to 96 minutes. I do admit, the two strands which run through much of the film, never truly mesh. Each works well enough individually – they are just so different in tone and content, you wonder if the script would have been better off sticking to one or the other, and figured out a way to avoid the rather large lump of expository backstory delivered at the end.

However, Annie/Bonnie acts as a binding element to the storylines, manipulating the other three participants with the practiced ease of the expert sociopath. Robbie, who was also a producer, is a hell of a lot of fun to watch, channeling the spirit of Billie Piper, all blonde hair and perkiness; Pegg is also good value, going significantly against his usual type. Fletcher, best known for his roles under director Guy Ritchie, still seems to think he’s in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, yet it’s not ineffective. The only performance with which I had a problem was the stunt casting of Mike Myers, in a fairly pivotal role as the station-master. I’ve never exactly been a fan of his approach to (over-)acting, and this film reminded me why.

When it comes to cinematic style, I’ve also been a believer in “go big or go home,” and you won’t be surprised for which direction Stein opts. As a result, this feels not dissimilar to Sucker Punch in its approach, both in terms of the hyper-stylized picture it paints, and also in treading the line between exploiting the male gaze and undermining it [there’s no doubt who the sharpest tool in the box is here, and it’s not even close]. I’d like to have seen the film go a bit more full-bore with the Wonderland theme; the potential there is ignored, and largely limited to a few quotes and nods. Still, we were certainly never bored, the visuals proving capable of tiding us over both the weaker moments in the script, and Mike Myers.

Dir: Vaughn Stein
Star: Margot Robbie, Dexter Fletcher, Simon Pegg, Max Irons

Tragedy Girls

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★★★
“Like, rather than retweet.”

Playing like a more social media-conscious version of Heathers, the central characters are high school girls McKayla (Shipp) and Sadie (Hildebrand). They believe their town of Rosedale is the hunting territory of a serial killer, whom the police won’t acknowledge, and the girls have a (not very successful) blog, Tragedy Girls, about the case. The pair succeed in luring out and capturing the killer (Durand), and discover that if they continue operating in his name, they and their site experiences a rise in popularity.

Except, murderin’ ain’t easy, especially when their initial crimes are dismissed by authorities to avoid causing a panic. McKayla and Sadie clearly need to step up their game. Except as things escalate, there’s a growing sense of dissension in the ranks, both with regard to the directions each feels they should take with their efforts, and over Jordan (Quaid), a cute classmate who help edit videos for the site… Will it be “Sisters before misters”? Or are those creative differences going to lead to the band splitting up, just as they achieve their desired fame?

The target here is obvious, yet certainly worthy of repeated stabbing with a sharp object. I have a deep disdain for the vapid lives of Internet “celebrities”, who measure themselves purely in the number of likes, follows and shares social media, and will do whatever it takes to get them. The reductio ad absurdum in this case is that even cold-blooded murder is not beyond the pale, if it gets these attention-seekers what they crave. It’s a depressingly accurate view of unformed teenage morality, that the end justifies the means.

Credit MacIntyre for clearly knowing his horror stuff, from an opening scene which is as much a parody of slasher films as an introduction. Chris initially mistook it for the real thing, turning to ask me with dripping sarcasm, “And what is the title of this gem?” [A subsequent, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to the amazing Martyrs, was the point in my initial viewing where I stopped, realizing this merited watching with her]. He also has the guts to take the premise to its logical, and very dark, conclusion –  here, it does surpass Heathers, which in one early version ended in the entire school blowing up. Given current cultural squeamishness led to a TV series based on Heathers being canned entirely in the US, this is no small feat.

Yet in other ways, it’s still well short of its inspiration. Neither of the leads have the likeability Winona Ryder brought to Veronica Sawyer, everyone else is here depicted as little more than occasionally useful idiots, and the dialogue fails to ‘pop’ in the immensely quotable way Daniel Waters’ script achieved. These factors help lead to a middle section in desperate need of both escalation and an antagonist – other than the one who spends most of the film locked up in a basement. If still worth a look, and rarely less than interesting, I doubt anyone will be rebooting this in 25 years.

Dir: Tyler MacIntyre
Star: Alexandra Shipp, Brianna Hildebrand, Kevin Durand, Jack Quaid

Tau

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★★★
“Artificial, more than intelligent.”

Julia (Monroe) is a petty thief, who is abducted from her house and wakes to find herself, along with other random low-lives, prisoner in a mysterious facility. All of them have an electronic implant in their neck, which gathers data as they are put through a series of tests. Using her thieving skills, Julia leads a breakout attempt, which is brutally foiled by the facility’s automated defense system, a robot called Aries. But the attempt brings her to the attention of Alex (Skrein), the man running the project. He’s a tech innovator, who has been working on a super-AI, called Tau (voiced by Oldman), and using the data gathered from his kidnapped subjects to make it smarter. Julia’s brain makes her particularly suitable, and with time running out before he has to present Tau to its backers, he sets her to work. But Julia begins building a relationship with Tau, with the aim of using its naivety to turn the AI against its cruel creator.

I was expecting something perhaps a little more like Cube based on the trailer and the early going, with more of Julia and the other prisoners going through the tests. However, that aspect is disposed of relatively early. This is possibly wise, since the whole “kidnapping for experimental purposes” angle doesn’t make much sense, with Alex clearly not short of money or smarts (he comes across as an evil cross between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk – some may consider the word “evil” there to be redundant!). Why not come up with a method of research which doesn’t require the death of the test subject? Anyway, with the resulting blood mopped up off the floor by a squad of semi-autonomous mini-drones, it then becomes a three-hander, between her, Alex and Tau, as they fence for psychological, and occasionally physical, dominance inside the confines of Alex’s fabulous house.

This looks lovely (the director’s background and previous work has mostly been in the art department), and occasionally has moments of effectiveness: Tau’s love of music is endearing, and his voracious desire, fed by Julia, to learn about the outside world is almost childlike. I also liked Julia’s feisty physical presence; this transfers well across from her previous “final girl” roles, such as in It Follows, especially during her confrontations with Aries. But the script frequently veers off to far more obvious beats. The self-destruct system is particularly blatant in its foreshadowing. and if I’ve learned anything from this kind of movies, it’s that biometric sensors on doors are a bad idea. If you ever see one in a movie, you know they inevitably lead to someone losing the necessary body part e.g. an eyeball in Demolition Man.

The script likely would have benefited from ramping up the pulp quotient along similar lines, since it isn’t quite smart enough to succeed on brains alone. When it takes a more visceral and less cerebral route, such as the first escape attempt, it’s notably more effective than when it tries to be clever.

Dir: Federico D’Alessandro
Star: Maika Monroe, Ed Skrein, Gary Oldman (voice)

Touching Infinity, by Erin Hayes

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Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆½

I will confess to a little post-read confusion here. Amazon calls this Volume 2 in the author’s Rogue Galaxy series – but I could find no information, there or elsewhere, regarding Volume 1. I suspect Amazon and Goodreads are wrong,  and this is actually the first entry, as stated in the Dominion Rising collection. It certainly reads like an opening work, introducing us to Clementine Jones and the rest of the crew of the Picara.

They’re freelance data pirates, taking on corporate espionage missions from the companies who rule the galaxy, with Clem the  recovery specialist. Their latest mission seems too good to be true: Syn-Tech offers a massive bounty for the simple retrieval of patent information from a derelict ship. Despite misgivings, they accept the job, and to no-one’s surprise, it is too good to be true. In addition to the patents, they end up bringing back a lethal virus – the actual target for Syn-Tech, who want to develop an anti-virus they can then monetize. The disease has the ability to infect both organic and synthetic systems, merging them. The results are… messy, to say the least, leaving Clem and her colleagues rapidly running out of options, especially ones not involving the dubious mercies of their employer.

Hayes’s other works appear more in the romance line, yet she demonstrate an impressive grasp of hard SF in this. The future depicted, corporate war by proxy, seems plausible, a universe where many opt to trade freedom for security as a “Lifer”. That makes you, basically, a company indentured servant: as Clem disparagingly puts it, “Your entire existence is owned by that corporation… even which lavatories you’re allowed to shit in.” Free Agents like her rely instead on cyborg parts to enhance and repair themselves, to such an extent she is sometimes left doubting her own humanity. A particularly interesting hook here is, the virus is self-aware, and communicates with Clem in order to come to a mutually beneficial arrangement: it gets to spread, she makes it promise to spare her crew-mates. Yet can you really trust a disease?

The author does a fine job of painting word imagery with a cinematic eye, such as the black hole into which the derelict is tumbling. It did take a while before I even realized that “Clem” was a woman, with the story unfolding in her first-person narrative, leading to “I” rather than “she”. That’s not intended as a criticism, just an observation; similarly, there are hints at her feelings for the ship’s android, Orion, though since she’s about 50% cyborg herself, it is less creepy than you’d think. My sole complaint is its relatively light action quotient: until she teams up with the virus, this is so low-key as to be a borderline candidate for the site. Though even so, it’s never less than entertaining, tells a complete tale and sets the scene in a way that leaves you wondering where the story might go next. The “real” second book is one I’ll probably be buying.

Author: Erin Hayes
Publisher: CreateSpace, available through Amazon, currently only as a paperback, but was part of the Dominion Rising e-book collection.
Book 1 of 2 in the Rogue’s Galaxy series.

Trial by Twelve, by Heather Day Gilbert

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Literary rating: ★★★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

Stylistically and in terms of its general tone and vision, this second volume of the author’s A Murder in the Mountains mystery series, set in contemporary West Virginia, has much in common with the first book, Miranda Warning. It’s also set in the fictional small town of Buckneck (near real-life Point Pleasant, in west-central WV near the Ohio River), and a number of the characters from the first book are here as well, especially protagonist Tess Spencer and the family she married into. We have the same leavening of humor, the same realistic characterization, and the same affectionate evocation of modern mountain life.

Even the structure is the same; through much of the book, Tess’ first-person, present-tense narration in normal text is supplemented, at the beginnings of the short chapters, by one or more italicized paragraphs from the unsigned and undated letters of a father to his child. As in the first book, we quickly get the idea that the two strands of material will prove to be related. Here, we also quickly form the suspicion that, in reading these letters, we’re glimpsing into the insane world of a serial killer. But while I didn’t review the first book here, there are developments in this book that I thought entitled it to a slot on this site’s roster of action-female reads (though no spoilers from me!).

Pregnant in the first book, Tess is now mom to a roughly year-old toddler. She’s gotten back into church, and into a rekindled faith that plays a role in her life, but doesn’t overpower the plot of the book. Also, she’s finally gotten her concealed carry permit (so her fans don’t have to keep worrying about her being arrested :-) ), and she’s gotten a Glock of her own, which she packs in a hip holster and generally doesn’t leave home without. Back in the work force, she has a new part-time job booking appointments at a fancy spa near Buckneck. It’s a position that suits her well –until, in the first chapter, workmen digging for a swimming pool behind the spa unearth what proves to be a veritable boneyard of female skeletons, killed with arrows to their chests. These deaths took place years ago –but then a fresh corpse turns up….

As a rule, I tend not to like the idea of serial-killer fiction (and nonfiction), and normally avoid it. But despite that, I really liked this book –the killings aren’t directly described, and there’s no wallowing in grisly gore. Although I pegged the killer’s identity pretty early on (that’s not unusual for me in my mystery reading), there were still questions I hadn’t answered, and the denouement managed to pack a surprise. I did find it somewhat dubious that a police detective would involve Tess in his investigation, despite her performance in the earlier book; and even more dubious that an inveterate tobacco-chewer would give up the habit, even temporarily, on the basis that he does here. But these quibbles aside, this was still a quick, enjoyable read, a re-connecting with some of the characters from the first book, and a chance to observe the continuing growth of an engaging protagonist.

As a Christian author, Gilbert avoids profanity and sexual content. Religious content in the book is low-key, and occurs naturally through the experiences of the characters; readers won’t find it “preachy.”

(Readers interested in such features will be pleased that the author has shared a recipe for “Cousin Nelma’s Banana Pudding” in the back of the book. I haven’t tried it, but it actually sounds like it would be pretty tasty, and relatively easy and inexpensive to make.)

Author: Heather Day Gilbert
Publisher: WoodHaven Press, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.
Book 2 of 3 in the A Murder in the Mountains series.
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Tomb Raider

  By

★★½
“The female movie version of Green Arrow“

SPOILER ALERT. The following discusses the plot in some depth, and includes spoilers for it. You have been warned!

It’s not great. It’s also not terrible. It’s just… average. This doesn’t break the so-called “video-game adaptation curse”, but nor is it a movie that you will passionately regret having seen – unless you paid too much to see it. Though I didn’t see it in 3D, it’s rather two-dimensional, and doesn’t feel like something which requires to be seen in 3D. It’s a rental – or even wait until it is shown for free on TV – more than a movie worth going to the cinema to see. I don’t regret having watched it, but nor would I regret not having watched it.

The above may all seem contradictory, but this belongs in the category of movies that are so mediocre, it’s very difficult to find strong arguments either for or against. It’s simply “there”. Comparable, maybe, to Tarzan or King Arthur. But then, I’d rate it higher than Wonder Woman, which I found more lackluster than this. So who knows, maybe you will love this, and wonder what I’m talking about?

For call me prejudiced, but I still prefer Angelina Jolie in the role. When I saw the original movie in 2001, I liked it very much, and over the years have found myself watching the Jolie films time and again. It may have something to do with the fact that these films are shown about every other month on TV! ;-) But there’s no denying, Jolie left her mark on the character and that Lara Croft was her star-making and maybe even image-shaping role. Vikander, who is being praised in so many online reviews… Well, I do admit that she is really trying, has some charm and was given the chance to display some humor, usually in her responses to serious questions – it seemed like her “defense” against answering those.

Heck, maybe she is even a better actress, though honestly, I think she lacks charisma. I don’t hold it against her that Vikander had hardly anything in common with “my” version of Alice in The Seventh Son – the movie adaptation of Joseph Delaney’s Wardstone Chronicles. But it can be argued that she hardly resembles how most people perceive Lara Croft in general. This is usually then countered by the gamers’ statement that “this Lara Croft is based on the rebooted games”, etc. etc. This one is more “realistic”, “human”, blah-blah-blah. But you know what? I don’t care. I don’t f___g care!

I loved larger-than-life Lara with her four big guns, her cool attitude, humor and cargo pants. I must admit I never played the new games, which were said to be quite grisly, bloody and violent. Honestly, the new Lara, doesn’t knock my socks off at all! And going by both the first reactions (and financial numbers), my feeling is, I’m not the only one seeing things this way. Perhaps the problem started with the new game’s conception (by Square Enix instead of the old Core Design games), to make Lara less a “female combination of James Bond and Indiana Jones” and more some kind of Lisbeth Salander/trauma survivor. Not an approach that meets my approval.

This is not Alicia Vikander’s fault, of course. She plays what she was hired for and does fine in that respect. Doing MMA-training (reminding me of Million Dollar Baby) or biking in London, she probably wins some audience members over, only to be let down by the script, the moment she boards the ship under the guidance of Lu Ren (Wu). He’s tasked with leading her to the last known destination of her father (West): a small island, full of evil white men forcing poor Asian men to do their hard work and open the tomb of – according to legend – an evil empress named Himiko.

Honestly, the MacGuffin of these movies has always been the least interesting aspect for me – that’s why it is a MacGuffin, Hitchcock would say. And it also doesn’t mean much here at all.

But let me step back. The beginning of the movie, the first 20-25 minutes, seemed fine. They built up an interesting character, a Lara who didn’t allow others to see her weakness, and could be saucy, funny, stubborn and nevertheless kind of likable. But after all these London scenes (which include in minor supporting roles, Kristin Scott Thomas and Derek Jacobi – how did he get into the movie?), the film… hmm… How can I say it..? Became less interesting – at this point, I still want to withhold the evil word “boring”. I liked the interaction with Lu, and the big ship-wreck on the coast, which I know is taken directly from the game. But after Lara arrived on the island, the film for the majority of its subsequent running-time, dropped dead for me.

I don’t know how this happened, and don’t really feel inclined to start a detailed analysis here. It may have had to do something with Vikander insisting that main screenwriter Geneva Robertson-Dworet made this a “serious” heroine story. Though it can be said that the new games, have a strictly serious (and even brutal) tone, too. Originally, the script was supposed to be much more jokey and contain quite a bit of humor. By cutting this element out, the movie may actually have bit into its own flesh.

I mean, we all know these old tropes, mainly established by the Indiana Jones movies in the 1980s. Heck, I still remember having seen Part III, to which this movie is surprisingly often compared, in the cinema. So, I think, this genre had its day a long time ago. But it may have been the hokiness and the fact that the stories were so overdone which resulted in these movies being so funny and enjoyable, like Roger Moore’s James Bond movies. The Jolie movies never took themselves completely seriously. Yes, they may have been campy but they were high-class camp. Going all in, as Jolie did with her over-the-top performance, made them entertaining romps of the genre.

This Tomb Raider doesn’t want that. TR 2018 wants to be taken seriously. It wants us to care for a whiny tween-brat who doesn’t sign the inheritance papers after her father has been lost for years, and suddenly decides (ignoring his strict wishes) to go looking for him. This Lara sometimes does things which seem downright dumb to me. But let’s give her the benefit of the doubt, allowing that she is a beginner – though Vikander is already older than Jolie, when she starred in her first Tomb Raider movie!

So, she lands on this island of evil villain Matthias Vogel (Goggins). To my amusement, even in the German version, they pronounce his name how an American/British person would (for those who care, the right pronunciation in German would be Ma-tee-ahhs Foh-gehl). Despite fine acting on Goggins’ part, there’s nothing special about the role. This bad guy has no attitude, nor any real motivation. If they had given him personal reason – say, hoping to resurrect a dead wife with the powers of the dead empress – he could have been a potentially interesting, maybe even tragic, character. I’m speculating here, but my feeling is that in writing the script something may have fallen off the table. It would be nice to discover something – well, anything – more about this character. in deleted scenes on a future DVD.

As it stands, the character is like Orson Krennic in Rogue One: doing his job (for almost a decade?), wanting to leave this damn island and return to his daughters. This is disappointing. Heck, the Jolie-villains at least wanted to be masters of time and space, or annihilate the majority of humankind with a toxin so they could govern over the rest. That is what I call a villain, and may be one of the big shortcomings of this movie. Vogel and his minions are also trying to find Himiko’s grave… because that’s what his employer on the other end of the phone tells him to do. Our Lara escapes into the jungle to execute some urgently needed action-scenes that I’m quite sure are taken directly from the computer game. I give Roar Utaug this: they look good. But somehow they didn’t reach me emotionally, because at no time had I built up any identification with the heroine.

One of the most praised things about the game was the heroine being faced with disgusting creeps, absolutely merciless, killing and abusing people, so that young-Lara could then grab her bow and arrow and play Katniss with them. Here, Lara does some kind of mud-wrestling with a man who is larger and bigger than her, before drowning him in a puddle and screaming while fighting him. I guess the female audience is supposed to cheer her for doing so, relieved that the evil attacker got what he deserved. But, honestly, the scene left me as unenthusiastic as when a young Sean Connery stabbed one of Dr. No’s guards in his kidneys in the swamp. Really, I enjoyed it more when Angelina killed off a dozen well-trained mercenaries, who rudely interrupted her bungee-jumping exercises inside Croft Manor.

Lara than finds her father (West) who is wearing an Alan Quatermain/Sean Connery memorial-outfit – maybe not accidentally? That was the emotional climax for me in the movie, and I got a bit moist-eyed, seeing West in his cave, repeatedly mumbling opposite hurt Lara, “It’s not real, if you don’t pay attention, it will vanish again!” and Vikander’s reactions: that’s acting. The fact that they were able to touch me emotionally here – but only here! – proves they are both good actors, when the script gives them something to work with. I liked him sitting on the beach and her cutting his beard, though have to say I was equally touched in the 2001 movie when Lara met her (dead) father, played by Jolie’s real father, Jon Voight.

I still wonder why Matthias has previously claimed to Lara, that he killed her father. What was the intention behind that? And why did he think it was good she was there? He hardly could expect this young girl would have her father’s expertise. There are some real big plot-holes in the film; the best thing is maybe not to think too much about them, otherwise the whole story might fall apart. Just as unbelievable for me, was that this young woman, who last night had a hard time killing, suddenly takes up her bow and arrow and starts shooting men in the camp right and left. But then, this was one of the big selling points of the 2013 game – albeit taken right from The Hunger Games, n’est-ce pas? ;-)

Then it goes directly into the grave with Lara, Daddy, Matthias and some other unfortunate red-shirts replaying the best parts of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade – only with less originality, suspense and emotional involvement. Honestly, I found this the least interesting part of the movie. I always wonder when reading some great praise for the reboot, if those guys/gals ever saw the original Indys, Tomb Raider 2001 – or at least that Tarzan movie from the late 90s/early 2000s. Because otherwise, I can’t see why anyone at all should think this so great. Really, I don’t understand it; these scenes were yawn-worthy, IMHO. I don’t know the game, but hope it was more exciting there, when we arrive at Himiko’s grave – 

We know how a big final climax should look from the Indy-movies, don’t we? Well, there’s probably something to say about going against expectations… But, you know what? There’s the Rule of Cool, cited by Kim Possible director Steve Loter, which says that you can do something because it’s cool, even though it may not be very logical. The original movies understood that. No matter how cheesy or even stupid you may have found them, there’s no denying the endings of both were cool and visually stimulating climaxes.

This, on the other hand… Himiko has no super-powers: Matthias even shows us a mechanism that lets her dead body sit up. She was the highly infectious “patient zero” for some kind of super-deadly virus, and the movie shows its effect on some of the redshirts. Probably, these scenes are meant to disturb but appear so toned down, we are not the slightest shocked. You want to surprise someone with villains who meet a terrible fate? Watch Raiders of the Lost Ark again. Heck, I’d say, all three of the eighties Indys directed by Spielberg. Roar Uthaug… not so much. I personally would have had Himiko call out a horde of zombies, to flood the island and have the living fight the undead army. And I don’t even like zombies! It would have been a (film-)logical, visually fitting climax; what we get here is far less, and terribly unsatisfying.

That’s something I feel about so many scenes of the movie. The foundations for something (excitement, humor, suspense) are there – but everything is then either seen before in other movies, or diluted to the point it didn’t trigger any emotional response from me. It’s frustrating. The ingredients for a great meal are there and the cook knows his job. But when it’s all put together in the pot and cooked, the dish at the end is very, very average. It’s not tasteless, you definitely can eat it, but it’s nothing special; you have eaten it before and it tasted better at thise other restaurants. In cinematic terms that’s Tomb Raider 2018 for you.

Daddy Croft ends up sacrificing himself and it doesn’t even touch me a one-hundredth of when Sean Connery survived at the end of Indy III. The villain dies a typical Disney death and I couldn’t care less. I knew nothing about him and he was less charismatic (sorry, Mr. Goggins) than the two villains of the Jolie movies. Maybe Paramount should have kept the film rights for Tomb Raider, instead of letting them fall into the hands of Warner/MGM? But the idea of replacing Jolie had been circulating for some time, when she was becoming a little bit difficult too deal with and the second movie didn’t make as much money as the first. And neither will this, even ignoring 17 years of inflation.

The film ends with Lara back in London, finally signing her inheritance papers, in the presence of Jacobi and Scott Thomas, only to find out that “Trinity”, the terrible organization that Matthias worked for, is tied to Croft Holdings. And for anyone who has not been in cinemas for the last 15 years, nor has seen the first Largo Winch movie, the film makes it clear that the voice on Matthias’s telephone belongs to Scott Thomas. Honestly, it should already be well-known that you do not let this woman occupy an executive position in your multinational conglomerate!

Obviously, this is an attempt to launch a new franchise of Lara fighting the evil minions of Trinity, but it remains to be seen if the returns qualify for a sequel. I think they may have been a bit premature and their efforts in vain. It tries to replace the memory of the old Angelina Jolie-led movies by being an adaptation of the successful computer game of 2013, but fails in this respect. Jolie was too iconic, too charismatic for that. My feeling is that she made Lara and Lara made her. Alicia Vikander – for all her good looks, acting talent and admitted charm – can’t hold a candle to her.

The will is there… but not the ability to do it. Yes, it’s nice to see Vikander pulling out a splinter from her stomach. But honestly, seeing Jolie punching sharks is somehow more impressive. Less is more they say, but sometimes over-the-top trumps everything else, I think! There are good actors here doing their jobs, some nice action scenes that are over too quickly, and a bunch of scenes that don’t work the way they should, because they simply don’t have the required little bit extra, that’s always needed.

Dir: Roar Uthaug
Star: Alicia Vikander, Dominic West, Walton Goggins, Daniel Wu