enTombing the Raiders

I loved the 2013 game, so why wouldn't I want to see The Cutscene: The Movie?

Richard Croft leaves Lara to go look for something and disappears, leaving Lara to act out about her loss. Some time later, she finds a clue to where he is, so goes to track him down, using all the work he put together and none of her own. Eventually she gets to the island and immediately is with the bad guy for a while before going into a tomb.

Okay, as a movie: this feels very pedestrian. Go to remote locale where Evil Team McEvil are trying to get Ancient Artifact of Power(tm) and be forced to help them... didn't I see this as an Indiana Jones movie? Or an episode of MacGuyver? It's hard to say what defines a movie as a "Tomb Raider" movie, but the 2001 movie felt more like a Tomb Raider movie than this did.

As a game adaptation, wut? There are some scenes replicated from the game (and a whole bunch done at once), but whereas we start on the island in the game, here we take around half an hour or so to get there. In the game, while Lara is fit, she uses tools (axe, bow and arrow, guns) to help here. In this movie, they go out of their way to show how scrappy Lara is and how she can take on people one-on-one, and point out how intellectual she isn't.

Not to say I had high hopes for the movie, but I did want better than this. Frankly, the cutscenes stitched together would probably have made for a better movie, whereas nothing in this surprised me. And where is the supernatural/mystical element? Did the movie makes do more than hear someone describe some of the plot down a staticky telephone line?

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