What Vicky Is Watching: Tomb Raider and Ocean's Eight

On DVD: Tomb Raider

She runs she fights she raids. The video game action heroine from Playstation’s smash hit series Tomb Raider gets a cinematic makeover in director Roar Uthaug’s Tomb Raider reboot. Uthaug’s reboot shrugs off the flimsy storyline and sexed up design of the original Angelina Jolie feature films and goes for gritty action instead.

This Tomb Raider is less of a boobalicious, bootylicious, babe running through green-screen choked sets and more Indiana Jones meets the Mummy, with Alicia Vikander starring as Lara Croft: the resourceful, brave, and scrappy female lead.

After her father Sir Richard Croft (Dominic West, The Hour) disappears on a quest to discover the whereabouts of the crypt of the mythical Queen Himiko on a remote Japanese island, Lara goes from pampered preteen girl to parentless overnight. Many years pass and our heroine is a bored and directionless twenty-something until  Ana (Kristin Scott Thomas), a powerful woman from her father’s company intervenes and brings the wayward Croft heiress back into the fold.

Refusing the sign papers admitting her father Sir Richard Croft is indeed dead, Lara pokes around Croft manor. In the family mausoleum, Lara uncovers her father’s deepest, darkest secret. He wasn’t just an esteemed businessman, but he lived a double life as an adventurer specializing in researching the supernatural. In his notes and files Lara reads about Sir Richard’s last mission before his disappearance. The Himiko Project. Himiko, Japan’s first queen, the notes warn, had the ability to kill others with just a touch. Basically, she was dark AF and went off on destruction and murdering sprees. She’s also linked to, you guessed it, immortality. Something that Sir Richard was fixated on ever since the premature death of his wife and Lara’s mother. So off he went, to find her remains!

Lara jets off to Hong Kong to track down one of her father’s contacts, Lu Ren, a seafarer who dropped Richard off at Yamatai- the jungle-covered island where Himiko is entombed. However, the Lu Ren (Daniel Wu, Into the Badlands) Lara finds isn’t quite who she was expecting. Lara and Lu, both fiercely independent and stubborn, collide like rocks. And like rocks being struck together humor, and sassy, witty, banter sparks up like, well, sparks from the collision. Lara and Lu have a visible and irresistible chemistry, one that doesn’t jump straight into romance territory. This isn’t a love story. Lara doesn’t get all swoony when she finds a guy that can challenge her. (Preach!)

Alicia Vikander stepping into the boots of the plucky adventurer is one of the absolute best things about Tomb Raider. Her personality is as intense as lightning bursting in the sky before a storm. She’s a survivor, a fighter, and gritty as hell. She’s not afraid to defend what she believes in even if it means she gets bloodied up in the process. 

There’s a lot to love about the physical appearance of Vikander’s Lara Croft too. She’s less of a pinup girl and more of an athlete as we see in the film’s opening scene where she’s engaged in a kickboxing match with another woman. This Lara Croft is a fighting force to be reckoned with. Her body isn’t waifish and slender but instead toned and strong. It’s the kind of body that carries her through her death-defying stunts. Training for over six months with Magnus Lygdback who also worked with Gal Gadot for Wonder Woman made sure of that.

The grueling fitness regimen with Lygdback and a specialized Keto diet led to Vikander gaining 12 pounds of pure muscle and doing nearly all of her own stunts. Vikander’s performance as Lara, an entirely redefined Lara, is amazing to behold! Can I get a YAAAS QUEEN!! Not only does she scale rock faces but she also hoists herself up and in a decaying plane on the verge of collapse, and survives a maelstrom out at sea. These thrilling sequences make her daring rescue mission to find her father actually daring. Tomb Raider, you’re doing it right. 

It’s that stunt choreography in combination with the settings and locations that make Tomb Raider’s universe so much more grounded and believable. So much of the fighting, exploring and stunts are set in real locations. The expansive jungle and beach scenes bring us right into the center of the action, tapping into our senses and plucking our tightly strung feelings into pure anxiety.

Part of that OMG dread also comes from the baddies our tomb raider encounters on Yamatai. Lara gets caught in the crosshairs of a shady organization camped on the island, The Order of the Trinity. Led by the cutthroat Mathias Vogel  (Walton Goggins) and run by seemingly lawless mercenaries who have enslaved many foreign and native people to dig, sift, and search through every square inch of the island, the Order has made their goal to exhume Himiko’s body and use her death touch to further their own sinister goals. Spoiler alert: they won’t be winning a Nobel Peace Prize anytime soon.

Tomb Raider is an absorbing adventure with visually exciting escapades, a brilliantly cast hard-as-nails heroine and a fantastical twist that is just the right amount of fizzy and foreboding. The script has some moments where it drifts into Hallmark card territory with sappy sentimentality but it’s easy to brush off. For the most part Tomb Raider’s plot is engrossing and the exchanges between characters are wickedly sharp, just like the machetes wielded by the unwitting captives. Info-dumps of exposition are scarce and  special effects and green-screen aren’t overused or especially obvious. If you watch just one new DVD release this month CHOOSE this. Hands down one of the most underrated movies of 2018 (yes, we’re officially halfway through). The must-see of this summer, Tomb Raider is an absorbing adventure with visually exciting escapades, a brilliantly cast hard-as-nails heroine, and a fantastical twist that is one part fizzy and two parts foreboding.

In Theatres: Ocean's Eight

It’s official. 2018 is the year of putting our best women forward! Encouraged by the extremely public and confessional campaigns #metoo, #timesup, and “The Future is Female”, women have taken up more space on the screen and behind the scenes in Hollywood. From this positively charged girl’s on top momentum comes Ocean's Eight.  Directed by Gary Ross (The Hunger Games and Seabiscuit) the Ocean’s spin-off brings together eight fierce, diverse ladies using their unique talents to pull off a jewelry heist to put ALL other jewelry heists to shame: stealing a hundred and fifty million dollar Cartier diamond necklace. 

The blingy show-stopper is kept under lock and key miles below ground in a vault. . . . until vain and dim starlet Daphne Kluger (Anne Hathaway) gets the green light to wear the stunner at the annual Met Gala. Daphne may think the fashion choice was all her own, but really it’s all by Debbie Ocean’s design. She and her BFF Lou (Cate Blanchett) hand-pick seven women, each with the skill to pluck the diamonds right off Daphne’s neck and the incentive to cash in from this crime of the century.

The A-list, star-studded cast truly does make Ocean’s Eight worth a trip to theatres. This collection of talent carries the movie with its somewhat derivative plot (according to YouTuber Chris Stuckmann it is nearly an identical “beat for beat remake” of Ocean’s Eleven but with a female cast) and makes it breezily watchable. The chemistry between the women sizzles on screen and Sandra Bullock’s Debbie and Sarah Paulson’s Tammy radiate charm and confidence with every step they take. Helena Bonham Carter as fashion designer Rose Wiel has an  eccentric and anxious energy that plays well against the other types of women in the squad, especially chillaxed hacker Nine Ball (Rihanna) and playful pick-pocket Constance (Nora Lum Ying/Awkwafina)

Apart from a side plot with Debbie’s ex-flame Claude Becker (Richard Armitage, The Hobbit) that gets a fair share of screen time, the focus is mostly on the Ocean’s crew’s mark, Daphne Kluger. She’s an antagonist in the faintest, most loose way possible, she’s most known for attitude. Hathaway in the role is delightfully vain and ridiculous. She flits around touching her neck, gazing in mirrors and cooing about her fame. She’s absurdly insecure and self-absorbed and in all her screen time she establishes herself as one of the most hilarious characters.

Conversely, some of the characters feel grossly underused. Take Amita (Mindy Kaling). She shares a brilliantly funny moment with Constance and a sequence with plenty of slow-burn humor with Rose but other than that she’s not given nearly enough material or screen time. With a comedian of Mindy Kaling’s caliber, it’s a bummer she couldn’t have more of a presence.  

Despite that, Ocean’s Eight itself is a dazzling movie. Literally. There is so much glitter and pizazz conjured up in the settings and amongst the extras and main cast. The Met Gala is set up as accurately as it is in reality and it’s actually filmed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We’re treated to strings of celebrity cameos that parade across the screen at the glitzy Gala. It’s impossible to not be caught up in the glamour of the location, but also the gowns the Ocean’s women wear. It’s a formula of elegance and excess and the camera work and cinematography makes it radiate. Ocean’s Eight is the most fashion-heavy heist film I’ve ever seen and one of the prettiest to look at movies I’ve seen all year. It almost makes it hard to glom onto Debbie’s blink-and-you-miss-it comment from the beginning of the film, “A him gets noticed, a her gets ignored.” Ignoring those show-stopping shimmery gowns!? As if!

Ocean’s Eight is not an epic film that requires an actual movie theatre experience. In other words, you don’t HAVE to see it on the big screen. But that doesn’t mean Ocean’s Eight is a dud. Yes, it errs on the side of predictable, and the stakes may not be so high for us as viewers but the stylishness sure is. It’s a femme-force fueled giddy heist comedy that’s like a cool blast of AC on a scorching hot summer day.  

Have you seen either of these movies? Drop a comment below!

gifs from giphy 

photos from IMDB