Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft review: a surprisingly good video game spinoff

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Lara Croft is one of the most recognizable characters in video game history. Hollywood, however, has never quite figured out what to do with her or her video game franchise, Tomb Raider, right. In the early 2000s, the industry produced a pair of unfortunate,Angelina Jolie-led film adaptations, both of which were poorly received when they were released and have more or less been lost to time. In 2018, Hollywood then took another crack at the property in the form of an Alicia Vikander-starring action romp that wasn’t as bad as its predecessors, but was also deeply forgettable.

As a result, while live-action and animated video game adaptations have never been better than they are right now, Lara Croft still feels like a player who has been left by the wayside when she should arguably be at the front and center of this current wave. That may change when and if Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s long in-development Tomb Raider series at Amazon eventually comes to fruition. For now, though, the franchise’s immediate future in Hollywood seems to rest entirely on Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft.

Netflix‘s new animated adventure series offers a fresh take on Tomb Raider’s mythology and iconic heroine — one that both fits between the franchise’s acclaimed reboot trilogy and the original games that started it all. It emerges over the course of its eight episodes as Hollywood’s most successful Tomb Raider adaptation to date. That may not seem like high praise, and the series itself is imperfect and occasionally frustrating. It is also surprisingly, endearingly earnest, and it cares enough about its heroine to not let her get lost in the rubble of all of its logic-defying action.

Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft begins after the events of 2018’s Shadow of the Tomb Raider. It finds Lara (voiced here by Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning star Hayley Atwell) struggling to move on from the traumatic death of her longtime mentor and surrogate father figure, Conrad Roth (Nolan North). In the present day, she has gotten into the habit of traveling the world and engaging in fistfights in order to avoid actually dealing with her grief and accepting the love and comfort of her two closest friends, Jonah (Earl Baylon) and Zip (Allen Maldonado). Her attempt to cut off all her ties to her past by selling her family’s many collected treasures is interrupted by a mysterious thief named Charles Devereaux (The Hobbit‘sRichard Armitage), who — like Lara — is haunted by a devastating past loss.

Devereaux crashes Lara’s grand auction and steals an ominous artifact of untold power. Lara sets off after him out of both anger and curiosity, and quickly discovers that the artifact he’s stolen is but one piece in a conspiracy that could send the entire world into complete chaos. What unfolds in the wake of this discovery is a race between Lara and Devereaux involving a collection of magical gems and apocalyptic stakes. It is a, perhaps unavoidably, very silly story, and The Legend of Lara Croft wisely doesn’t try to develop its central, supernatural plot beyond its surface-level purposes. Instead, the series invests more time in crafting a real emotional arc for Atwell’s Lara — one that sees her forced to reevaluate her purposefully closed-off nature and the walls she’s built to keep even her most trustworthy friends from getting too close to her.

At times, The Legend of Lara Croft‘s writing — overseen by showrunner Tasha Huo — borders on ham-fisted. Its first two episodes, in particular, suffer from clunky exposition dumps and even more jarring flashbacks, as well as dialogue exchanges in which characters like Jonah and Zip end up literally spelling all of Lara’s problems out loud to her. The series starts to find a more comfortable rhythm in its third installment, and its weaving in of Lara’s emotional hang-ups and self-destructive habits grows more seamless from there on out as well. The Legend of Lara Croft is, thankfully, not content to just let its lead heroine parkour her way through various obstacles and set pieces. The show cares very deeply about her, and obvious thought was put into developing more than just her physical and puzzle-solving skills. Its affection for its flawed lead turns out to be surprisingly infectious, too.

For her part, Atwell proves to be as well-suited a casting choice for Lara Croft as she seems on paper. Her vocal performance anchors and lifts up the Netflix series, and Atwell always sells her heroine’s emotional ups and downs, even when they are happening in the most ridiculous of circumstances. The actress, like Huo and everyone else involved in the animated series, puts real effort into bringing Lara to life here. She is a fully fleshed-out, multidimensional hero in The Legend of Lara Croft — one whose heroism feels alternately costly and righteous at different points throughout the show’s eight episodes.

The series is, by no means, the best animated effort that Netflix has ever produced. Its appeal may not extend far beyond existing Tomb Raider fans, either, and there are multiple instances when the show’s character designs and set pieces feel too deeply indebted to The Legend of Lara Croft‘s video game roots. By putting so much thought and care into its characterization of its protagonist, though, the series retroactively reveals just how much humanity and heart has been missing from Hollywood’s past, lackluster Tomb Raider adaptations. The Legend of Lara Croft, conversely, has both in spades.

Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft is streaming now on Netflix.