Tomb Raider review: Heroine for a new generation deserves more than timid reboot

The premise of a female Indiana Jones might sound timely, but can a modern heroine get away with Indy's zest for pilfering antiquities and gunning down people of colour? The very title – Tomb Raider – conveys a view of cultural appropriation too breezy to be other than problematic.

For Norwegian director Roar Uthaug and his team, the solution is timidity: in every respect, their Tomb Raider is a film that undershoots the mark.

Now played by Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina), the intrepid Lara Croft is introduced as a young woman barely out of her teens, although in reality Vikander is 29, a couple of years older than Jolie was when given the role.

At the start of her origin story, Lara is an heiress in revolt against her posh British background, working as a bike courier to pay for training sessions at a boxing gym. A no-sweat type keen to fit in with the boys, she's not obviously a globetrotting superwoman in the making, despite a skill set that includes archery, a knack for solving brainteasers, and the ability to bust out an appropriate Shakespeare quote.

Still, her puzzle-solving smarts come in handy in following a trail of clues left by her long-lost father (Dominic West), last seen on a quest to stop an evil empress returning from the dead. While the rational Lara has no patience with mumbo-jumbo, she soon finds herself headed for a mysterious island off the coast of Japan, captained by a drunken sailor played by Hong Kong star Daniel Wu (acting rather woodenly in English).

At its core, the film is a revisionist version of Raiders of the Lost Ark, leaving you wondering why it was handed to a director whose evident bent is for TV-style realism.

The action set-pieces are sporadic and minimise gunplay (the best is the first, a bloodless bike chase through the streets of London). Exposition is delivered in static scenes by prestige actors (mainly Kristin Scott-Thomas as Lara's snooty guardian, with Derek Jacobi turning up briefly as a lawyer). As a rival adventurer, the sweaty, leering Walton Goggins is clearly bursting to play an 1980s action-movie villain, but is allowed only the minimum of sadistic flair.

Vikander successfully conveys the toughness and focus you might expect in, say, a champion triathlete. But she struggles to endow Lara with iconic force, which is not altogether her fault, considering how little she has to work with. In theory there could be benefits to keeping the character life size, but she has no interesting inner conflicts, and only a sporadic sense of humour (jokes, in general, are infrequent, beyond a cameo from Nick Frost as an oafish pawnbroker).

Even Lara's longing for her father, her main motivation, doesn't tell us much except that the two were kindred spirits; perhaps a sequel will shed more light on her mother, whose long-ago death is hardly more than a plot point. As far as this story goes, romance and sex don't exist for her, which, regardless of the script, could never be said of any character played by Jolie.

All of these choices have been carefully made, presumably with an eye to an audience of girls significantly younger than the film's Lara.

Uthaug deserves some credit for steering clear of the usual sexism and racism (only two tombs are raided, one of them the Croft family vault). The problem is that he hasn't come up with anything to replace these reflexes, and if the entire exotic adventure genre is built on an irresponsibility that no longer passes muster, why bother with a new Tomb Raider at all? Even in changing times, filmmakers need bigger goals than being inoffensive.

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