The videogame action movie tends to get a lot of crap it doesn't entirely deserve. No, none of them are ever going to be perfect icons of the genre. But as perfectly satisfactory entertainment, I quite enjoy most of the Resident Evil franchise, for example. The best have trashy pleasure and don't get too dragged down by complex backstory that drags over awkwardly from the games. The worst ... well, they're Assassin's Creed.
"Tomb Raider" has the double-distinction of being both video game based and a reboot (it's based on a reboot in the games) - whereas the early 2000s films with Angelina Jolie had a certain high camp, ludicrously convoluted mythologies and some gratuitous ogling of the man-meat put alongside Angelina (Daniel Craig in the first one, Gerard Butler in the second), this one takes things a tad more seriously. The plot is fairly standard action-adventure shenanigans (woman discovers her father disappeared in search of a lost secret island, she goes and finds an evil conspiracy and a buried secret that only she can reveal) - but it makes a pretty good fist of it. Probably there's about 20 minutes in the middle as Lara flees from peril-to-peril-to-peril in which the film is at its flat-out-best, and on either side when we're given space to think it rounds back down to "pretty reasonable", but this never gets too ludicrous for words. I can't say this is the most awesome movie about raiding of tombs ever because "Raiders" still exists but it's a pretty reasonable effort.
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