Warning: This review of Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft contains minor spoilers.
As both a film and video game journalist/critic of almost two decades I have seen my fair share of video game adaptations across film and television. Most of them, as we all know, are not great but Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft is more than just not good, it’s also not a show. Instead of taking advantage of the shift in medium, Netflix and Legendary have delivered an animated series that fails to feel like anything more than a video game without that crucial aspect of gameplay.
Starring Haley Atwell as the voice of Lara Croft, the titular Tomb Raider, the series is a continuation of the franchise reboot that started with 2013’s Tomb Raider and continued through two more games and a series of comics. Picking up sometime after the conclusion of the third game, we find Lara risking life and limb as her collection of friends, including Zip (Allen Maldonado) and Jonah (Earl Baylon) worry about her reckless abandonment. This comes to a head when a devilishly handsome thief steals an artifact from Croft Manor, spiraling into an apocalyptic showdown where Lara must save the world from total destruction.
The series wants this to be another step in the growth of the girl we met in the reboot into the legendary Tomb Raider, Lara Croft. However, it all feels like a retread. We spent three games with Lara as she struggled to get over her guilt and abandonment issues, but the show makes it seem like she’s in the exact same place she’s always been — just more buff now. Beyond that, the series hardly takes advantage of a show’s ability to tell more complex stories, instead simply spiraling from one set piece to the next while speed-running a kind of “coming of age” tale for Lara in which she discovers the true treasure was the friends she made along the way.
It all comes back to the show feeling like a story Crystal Dynamics rejected for their next game — like it wasn’t good enough for a AAA video game or even the next Tomb Raider film. Instead, they crammed it into an animated series. Each episode feels painfully like a video game level, jumping Lara and her team (Zip speaking in her ear constantly, exactly like a video game would deliver exposition) to different locales and set pieces. Except you can’t play through the brief, lackluster action sequences, and the 30-minute run time of each episode hardly gives you time to enjoy the locales. At one point Lara is in Paris but we spend nearly the entire time, aside from a brief rooftop parkour session, inside a small apartment.
It would, in fact, probably make a somewhat interesting game if the clichéd plot had some gameplay to back it up. At multiple points throughout the series, I thought of how much more fun I’d be having if I was playing what was going on instead of watching it. There are even moments when Lara is taken over by a demonic rage crystal that could have made an interesting “rage mode” mechanic in a game. Instead, it all just feels kind of boring and trite, with the series even culminating in a final boss fight in which Lara has to knock off specific parts of a creature to defeat it. It is nearly inconceivable how little this show wants to be a show and how much it wants to be a video game.
It doesn’t help that the animation is just OK and sometimes outright bad. Powerhouse Animation Studios, the animation studio behind the project, delivered the pretty good-looking Castlevania but on the whole The Legend of Lara Croft feels more slapdash. Often within quick-moving action sequences, character animation seems distorted or proportions are out of whack, with animation looking choppy or sometimes cut-and-paste. It doesn’t feel low-budget, but it doesn’t feel high quality either.
That could all be overlooked if the series was interesting at all, but this season just seems there to set up Lara to take on yet another secret society bent on controlling the world from the shadows, a plotline already explored in the games. Not everything is a repeat, however. One strange omission from the games is the absence of guns. After mass murdering people for three games straight, Lara spends nearly the entire series without a firearm and even seems remiss to harm people. That is until an entirely unearned moment in the final episodes brings back one of Lara’s most iconic looks, but it’s so out of left field that it hardly feels like a big deal.
One of the few highlights of the series is Haley Atwell taking over voicing duties for Lara Croft. The actress has the perfect voice for this iteration of the character and she seems genuinely interested in doing it. The few emotional moments that aren’t scripted like daytime soap opera melodrama are between her and Baylon, and both actors deliver in spades. The rest of the cast, comprised of people from the games that you can’t quite remember, are as forgettable as a cast of characters you can’t quite remember — mostly because they’re all rote clichés. Even the villain of the series, who should be at least fun to watch, has no gravitas or presence, leaving everything as flat as the animation.
Maybe it was silly to expect more from a Tomb Raider television show, but the rebooted games did a pretty good job of balancing the emotional with the fantastical and the necessary action. It seems, however, that when you remove the gameplay and don’t replace it with anything interesting, you get something completely devoid of, well, interest. Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft never wants to do anything bold, content to retread stories the franchise has already told, pulling us no closer to a more fully realized Lara Croft and leaving one wondering if she was ever really an interesting character at all.
Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft will arrive on Netflix on Oct. 10.