Tomb Raider Review: 4 Ups & 5 Downs

Downs...

5. It's Way Too Long

Tomb Raider clocks in at 118 minutes in length, and makes you feel just about every minute of that run-time due to some painfully poor pacing.

For starters, the first act is a wildly bloated, distended affair, bombarding the viewer with heaps of stodgy "character development" (but it's really just aggressive exposition), and a peculiar sequence where Lara (Vikander) takes part in a "foxhunt", where she rides a bike through the streets of London in the hope of earning some cash.

It's a whole 40 minutes before Lara even reaches the remote island on which her father disappeared, and even then, the remaining hour-plus of the movie rarely manages to hit an energetic groove. Clearly, there was no need for this film to run longer than around 100 minutes, but instead the end result feels needlessly drawn-out and exhaustingly overlong.