Cranky T-Rex's Blog

Hollywood is still chasing that magic unicorn: a good film adaptation of a video game. They tried doing Tomb Raider twice before starring Angelina Jolie, and the results were...let's just be charitable and say mixed. But, the video games got a reboot, and Hollywood loves it some reboots of existing franchises, so here we are again with a completely new take on Lara Croft. The new version of Lara trades in her DDs for a little more personality and a lot more vulnerability, this time in the form of Alicia Vikander. It also dumps all the campy stuff that tends to go along with a character who is famous for somebody accidentally giving her giant triangular boobs.  Unfortunately, if you're going to play it serious like that you really have to be on point, and this new Tomb Raider ...is not. So let's talk about why that unicorn remains free:

Well it's here at last, the first black superhero movie ever to be released in February of 2018, Marvel's Black Panther .  Snark about the stupid amount of hype thanks to the politics surrounding this movie aside, my expectations for Black Panther were pretty much the same as I have for every Marvel movie, even though I wasn't especially sold on the trailers. Marvel's track record is making entertaining superhero romps, and even when they're rather mediocre, usually they're at least a good time at the theater. So that's basically what I expected here too. It's kind of what separates Marvel from its competitors, who tend towards either hitting a homerun like Deadpool or striking out so profoundly with something like Batman v Superman or Fant4stic that you want to find the nearest studio executive and drown them in their own blood.  Marvel on the other hand doesn't run from their comic book characters; they embrace the things that make them fun s...