Rating: ***
Review Date: 11/11/24
Cast: Hayley Atwell
Contains 8 episodes
"In greed, one accepts the false and loses the real. This is chaos."
Serving as a bridge between the Survivor Trilogy and the original "Tomb Raider" game, this series starts out with a confident, skilled, and rather reckless Lara Croft (Hayley Atwell) stealing a certain treasure that her father had always been looking for. She keeps herself active and living on the edge in an attempt to avoid dealing with her grief and guilt, and refuses to return home to Croft Manor. Once she finally does come home, she decides to purge her demons by donating her father's entire collection to charity. However, this attracts some unexpected attention when a man named Charles Devereaux decides to break into the mansion and steal Lara's recently acquired and seemingly worthless trinket. Naturally, he turns out to be a power-hungry madman bent on revenge, and Lara had the first piece of a dangerous puzzle dating back to ancient Chinese mythology. This leads her and Jonah on a globetrotting adventure to retrieve the other Peril Stones before Devereaux can unleash chaos on the world.
First of all, the show looks and sounds great. The animation and character design are excellent, and Hayley Atwell gives a wonderful performance. However, the show tends to be a bit too "gamey," which sounds funny since it's based on a game, but there are obviously certain aspects of a game that don't translate well to cinema. The show also gets off to a bad start by having Lara perform several feats of superhuman strength and agility that are nothing short of absurd, which really ruins the tone. And then the show pivots 180 degrees back to the weak, insecure, and emotionally damaged girl with unresolved daddy issues that she was in the Survivor Trilogy, which I'm also not a fan of. Fortunately, it manages to strike a decent balance after a few episodes, but the daddy issues remain. Ironically, Devereaux has his own daddy issues, and they're even worse. The games have never shied away from the supernatural, but the show goes a little too far into that realm for its own good. That said, I always love seeing Lara Croft in action, and the first season ends on a maddening cliffhanger that will hopefully bring some much needed closure with her equally traumatized former best friend, Samantha Nishimura. A second season has already been greenlit, so I'm anxiously looking forward to that.