Review of Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft

After the first episode, I was ready to leave Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft. Not because Netflix's latest animated video game adaptation is that bad, mind you. But the 35-minute premiere, which introduces us to Lara and many of the characters we've come to know from Crystal Dynamics' more recent Tomb Raider games, just wasn't that compelling. And the seven episodes that follow never get better. The story didn't grab me right away (and only gets more ridiculous), the animation is both generic and minimalist, most attempts at humor fail, and the writers don't give the actors all that much leeway. It's fine – there's plenty of globetrotting and some fun action – but if there's a second season, I don't think I'll tune in.

The Legend of Lara Croft doesn't establish Lara's legend so much as her emotional toll. When we meet her here (played by Hayley Atwell, aka Peggy Carter from the MCU), she has already been on many archaeological adventures with her friends, but remains stubborn in her search for ancient artifacts and keeps her best friends at an emotional distance. She never really lets them in to see the real Lara, who is tormented not only by her father's death before the series, but also by the death of her surrogate father and mentor Roth, who dies in Lara's arms in a flashback – and his Death makes her responsible for the death on herself.

We also meet Jonah (Earl Baylon, reprising his role from the games), her right-hand man on the field and her voice of reason; Zip (Allen Maldonado), her tech guru who is the guiding voice in her ear and her eye in the sky; Sam Nishimura (Karen Fukuhara), her estranged best friend; and Camilla Roth (Zoe Boyle), her, er, other estranged best friend. Soon the villain enters the scene: Charles Devereaux, a what-if-Lara-had-gone-bad caricature. He's voiced by Richard Armitage, aka Trevor Belmont from the excellent Netflix series Castlevania – so it's a little odd to hear him as the antagonist here. Obsessed with avenging his own father's death, Devereaux seeks a collection of mythological stones that promise great power to take revenge on those who took his father from him. But his quest quickly devolves into comic-book camp levels that seemed in stark contrast to the supernatural but otherwise quite serious tone of this series.

Lara's eight-part pursuit of Devereaux and the stones does what you'd expect from Tomb Raider, taking us to many locations around the world, from Croft Manor, where Lara apparently doesn't want to move, to a nearby British museum, as well as further afield Places like China, Paris, Pasargadae, Mongolia and more. Keen-eyed fans of the Tomb Raider game may even recognize one or two of these, which is a welcome nod to that series' source material. Each episode takes us to a new place, which helps the series avoid monotony from a visual perspective. And yes, graves are looted and adventures are had. There's decent action and an occasional dash of humor, much of which is missing (one notable exception: in episode six, when Lara hilariously tries to get past a tourist family at an amusement park).

But the aforementioned animation fails to make any of this look particularly interesting. Many of the backgrounds are still art, which would be forgivable if Tomb Raider leaned more heavily on the animation aesthetic of the 70s or 80s. Instead, the show feels cheap and rushed, with a few obvious 3D animation shots that look out of place compared to everything around it. Apart from Jonah, Lara's friends don't have much to do and no chance to break out of their generic sidekick roles.

The worst offense, however, is history. The plot quickly becomes so nonsensical that I probably wouldn't have minded watching Tomb Raider on Saturday mornings as a kid, but I don't – and this is most definitely not a children's animated series, due to the verbose, shrug-off series-off , on-screen murders that earned this series a TV-14 rating. To be fair, a nonsensical plot is a criticism that could also be leveled at many Tomb Raider games from all eras – perhaps it's no coincidence that my favorite is 2015's Rise of the Tomb Raider, which is the keeps things as grounded as the franchise always has. Perhaps fittingly, the inevitable confrontation with the big bad plays out as if it were modeled after a boss fight in a video game. But not a good one.

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