Alicia Vikander’s Lara screams in pain when she gets hurt, she barely overcomes her enemies in combat, and the burgeoning badass continually makes mistakes that she needs to learn from during her mission.
In fact, at one point during Tomb Raider’s run, Lara even makes a crack about not being a superhero, and while it seems like a simple one-off line, it actually highlights why Tomb Raider works so well.
She’s a heroine with so much more room to grow and evolve, and a hypothetical Tomb Raider 2 could inch the dial forward ever-so-slightly by finally allowing her to fire her two iconic handguns.
In a landscape dominated by films from the Marvel Cinematic Universe or the DCEU, it’s genuinely refreshing to get a film that doesn’t feature a hero who shrugs off bullets or wears a cape.