‘Tomb Raider’ takes us back to early years

Taking the "Muppet Babies" approach to the Lara Croft film franchise, "Tomb Raider" decides to take us back to our heroine's early years and discover just what led her to her globe-hopping, treasure-hunting ways.

When the original "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" was released 17 years ago, it played like an update of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" made by those who only saw trailers of the original. It spawned an awkwardly titled sequel – "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: The Cradle of LIfe" – in 2003, which was marginally better (thanks to veteran action director Jan DeBont). But when the pic tanked at the box office, future installments were wiped off the table.

In 2013, the video game on which it was based received a major overhaul, and a decidedly different Lara. The earliest versions on the game (first released in 1996) presented a curvaceous, buxom heroine dressed more for a beach volleyball game than an intrepid jungle adventure.

Perhaps taking cues from the popular "Hunger Games" series, Lara was re-envisioned as a scrappy, realistically proportioned lead who was tenacious but vulnerable. The game was a hit and spawned three additional titles in the newly restored franchise.

Which leads us to this latest "Tomb Raider" film, starring Oscar-winning actress Alicia Vikander as the lead and employing an artsy up-and-coming director (Roar Uthaug) to lead the charge. It certainly presents audiences with the most competent, thrilling film to date based on the games, and it is oh-so-close to becoming a solidly entertaining yarn of its own distinction. The Indiana Jones shadow still looms large over the project, so it comes just short of establishing its own right to exist.

Much of the hindrance is the need to establish exposition. We meet Lara before her first big adventure, when she is eking out her existence as a London bike messenger. She stands to inherit millions from her adventurer father, but in order to do so, she must sign papers to officially declare that his four-year absence means he is dead and not merely missing.

Just as her pen is about to hit the paper, she receives a puzzle that includes a key and a riddle to essentially unlock much of her dad's research into the supernatural; this soon has her heading out to Hong Kong in search of a legendary Japanese demoness.

To get there, she enlists the help of a hard-drinking boat captain, Lu Ten (played by the wonderfully dry Daniel Wu) and they chart into the tumultuous seas in search of a mysterious island. Once ashore, they encounter Mathias Vogel (played by always-reliable Walter Goggins), the head of a shadowy group in search of the same thing as her father. Mathias has gone a little "Heart of Darkness," and is itching to do whatever it takes to get off the island and back to civilization.

It's all a solid setup, and the fact that the screenwriters put aside the supernatural elements of the original films for more of-this-earth action (for the most part) is equally reassuring. However, there's much time dedicated to erecting a foundation for future features (involving some sort of reticent Trinity organization that wants possession of the "supernatural" artifacts). This is fine, but it happens at the expense of some character development involving a few rather interesting individuals.

Wu, for example, is charming and engaging as the reluctant boat captain Lu Ten, carrying the same loveable loutish qualities of one space smuggler who is getting his own film in a few months. But during the heavy lifting, he's nowhere to be found. The same goes for Kristin Scott Thomas, Lara's longtime guardian. She appears in about two bookended scenes, and we still are unsure as to her motives. Vikander, for all her strengths as an actress, shows glimmers early on but soon becomes adrift in a sea of digitized action sequences. At least the film does not resort to the familiar final showdown of a world-claiming creation of pixelated proportions, but it's so busy trying to impress us with overstaged action sequences that it forgets why the producers hired an Oscar-caliber actress as the lead in the first place. "Raider" is not as bad as it is just far too familiar, but it does offer hope – now all that setup has been established, we can follow our heroine on to a far more thrilling adventure.