Tomb Raider

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider is beloved by fat, lonely men of a certain age, but not for her prowess in raiding tombs. As far back as the 90s she has revealed to those tubby, tubby two-by-fours that they need never leave their basements to fall in love. And if they know how to install mods, they will reach the promised land, the one where they can control boobsy naked ladies shooting guns and swinging from ropes. Right there on the screen was everything they could ever want: weapons and unrealistically enormous and firm tits. Plus, she liked the same thing as them: basic video game plots and lack of real human interaction.

Twenty-plus years later, we’re in a period where the video game and movie industries are taking baby steps toward treating women a little better, a little more equally, despite it making alt-right retards still sucking their mommy’s teats struggle feel emasculated. When I say baby steps, I mean they hire women with smaller breasts and sometimes they let ladies save themselves rather than wait for Dwayne Johnson to do it.

The movie Tomb Raider is the second attempt to bring the shitty video game series to the big screen and it’s one more itty-bitty advance. They’ve given Lara Croft, now played by Alicia Vikander, smaller boobs, a constant scowl and the ability to get herself out of a scrape. She’s still a daddy’s girl, though, only going on adventure in search of the dad who abandoned her. Worse, though, is that she is Lara Fucking Croft. Those grassfuckers in Hollywood are so bereft of ideas that they can only think to resurrect the overtly sexual video game obsession of basement dwellers in order to find a female to headline a movie. That’s cowardly chicken shit. It’s the diarrhea of unimaginative bean-counting dicklickers trying to appease fapping fatsos while hoping not to get accused of being insensitive, sexist dumbasses. Only a fucking moron can’t tell that the stiff and fraudulent heroine of Tomb Raider is about ten million miles away from an original and complex one like Imperator Furiosa. But Furiosas take passion and creativity to bring to life. Those are two things Tomb Raider has none of.

The movie plays exactly like a shitty video game. I babysit this kind named Carlos in my apartment complex sometimes when his mom is too drunk or too late to find someone else to do it. Mostly, I eat food out of their freezer, look for hidden booze and watch Carlos play this Playstation game called Uncharted. In it, this dude climbs walls, shoot bad guys and avoid falling into bottomless pits. Over and over and over. That’s all this movie is. The difference is that in the game Carlos fails all the time and has to start over. In this movie, the video game character always gets it right the first time.

Lara Croft starts out as a street urchin, barely getting by in London as a sexy bike courier among over-adrenalized dudes. Secretly, though, she’s the heir to the massive Croft fortune, that she refuses to claim because she’d have to acknowledge that her missing daddy is dead. She won’t, though, preferring to be poor and hope against hope that even after seven years he’s still alive. One day, she discovers his hidden lab and that he was tracking a secret society who wanted to destroy the world. In his final message to his daughter, Senior Croft tells her to destroy his findings. 

So, what does Lara do? She goes looking for her pappy while carrying his detailed directions on where to find the weapon that will destroy the world. You know, the ones she was supposed to destroy because really bad people were looking for them. She’s a fucking idiot. 

Her trek leads her first to Hong Kong for a little running around and shooting, followed by a boat trip to a tropical island populated by an army of bad guys who want her dead, and also only needed the information she carried to them in order to complete their evil plans. After escaping them while climbing, scrambling and avoiding falling in chasms, Lara discovers her pops isn’t really dead (anyone in the audience who finds this to be surprising has never been to the movies before—those grassfuckers expect us to be, though, because they are always generous in what they think an audience owes them). After Lara further helps the bad guys with bad judgment (e.g. agreeing to unlock the secret door for them), there is a long and tedious sequence of action inside catacombs buried in a mountain. We’re talking rope swinging, avoiding stepping on booby traps, collapsing floors. You know, all the shit in Lego Indiana Jones for the Wii. It all culminates with a boss battle against the top bad guy, zombies and many more things anyone who plays video games has already seen.

There are no surprises in Tomb Raider. Narratively, it’s just a lazy mashup of what’s been done before, and the twists have the shock value of a rerun of Lawrence Walk. Lara Croft is a fucking boring nitwit. She makes terrible decisions, she scowls a lot and she grunts more. Yet, nobody thought to give her even a tic or a trait that made her standout for anything more than wearing a sport bra stiff and strong enough to support traffic over the Mississippi. The villain (Walton Goggins), too, is so fucking forgettable that one day later I mostly just recall that he had a beard. He’s bad just because we’re told he is, but not bad in any permanent and horrifying way, like having the Harelip pin you to the floor of the Stardust Lounge and fart in your face.

Tomb Raider spends a shitload of screen time having characters tell us that Lara and her dad are both brilliant. It spends no time showing us that they are. The reason for that is because showing intelligence requires someone smart to make the movie. Even a God damn chimp can tell you someone is smart. Tomb Raider is also the sort of movie where the good guys always kill on the first shot, while the bad guys with far more soldiers and bigger weapons, just can’t seem to hit anyone. Thank God we get a flashback of Lara as a child shooting apples with a bow and arrow, so we can totally understand how as an adult she never misses a moving target with one, and her arrows kill baddies instantly. The movie, however doesn’t, explain, how she herself can take so many falls and endure so many wounds without ever slowing down and can heal miraculously fast. 

This must be the movie version of the video game set on its lowest level of difficulty. That’s probably all the director Roar Uthaug (is this really Uwe Boll?) and a small army of screenwriters did for research. So, nice try, Hollywood. It’s really sweet that you tried to make a movie where the woman is the hero, even if you really are doing it to appease those basement-dwelling pigs whose keyboards are smothered in Croft-inspired jizz. Maybe next time you can give a shit about what you're making and put the effort in to make a life like heroine. Two Fingers.