By Susan JAMES

Toned, tan and ready to kick butt, the lead character in “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” swings into action in a new adventure targeted at the video games demographic. Stop me if you’ve heard this, but a young girl, heir to a fabulous fortune, has lost her father in a way no one can explain. Everyone around her keeps telling her that he’s dead. She refuses to believe them and goes on a quest to find him. This appears to be the plot du jour for every girl from Rey in “Star Wars” (yes, I know Luke isn’t really her father) to Meg in “A Wrinkle in Time.” Norwegian director Roar Uthaug, from a script by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons, follows his own path toward girl power, teasing supernatural elements while focusing on swashbuckling adventure. It turns out to be a good mix.

Alicia Vikander plays a younger, less emphatic Lara than her predecessor Angelina Jolie. Her relationship with dad Sir Richard (Dominic West) is shown in flashback scenes recounting his many abrupt and unexplained departures from his palatial estate in England and his young daughter. Head of a mighty corporation he also has a secret life hunting evil objects and preventing them from destroying the world. Like all good heroes who’ve lost their fathers, Lara turns her back on his fortune and makes a pittance as a bike messenger in London. Croft corporate custodians Ana Miller (Kristin Scott Thomas) and Mr. Yaffe (Derek Jacobi), both woefully underused, are pressuring Lara to take control of her father’s business.

A clue to Sir Richard’s disappearance sends her instead to Hong Kong and a drunken boat owner named Lu Ren (Daniel Wu). Lu’s father disappeared at the same time as Lara’s on a voyage to an uninhabited island off the coast of Japan. Although a message left for her by Sir Richard warns Lara to burn all of his notes regarding an ancient and mysterious queen of Japan named Himiko, Lara instead uses the information to hire Lu and plot a course on his boat for the lost island of Yamatai.

Director Uthaug is addicted to tomb raider video games and from Lara and Lu’s arrival on Yamatai, the movie goes into video game mode. The closely packed action sequences come at a pace guaranteed to keep the movie pulsing forward. If it seems like “Indiana Jones” revisited, with a dash of “The Hunger Games” thrown in, that’s okay because the action moves so quickly that only as the credits roll does the feeling set in that you’ve seen all of this before.

Vikander is a credible Lara. She runs, jumps, falls, fights and grunts with great authority. Suspense may be strained by the fact that no matter the threats she faces, we know she’ll never be killed or even severely injured. As she reaches a perfectly manicured hand out of a collapsed cave near the end of the movie, it’s obvious that Lara may break into a sweat fighting evil but she will never, ever break a nail. In the teasers at the end of the film for what is obviously a planned sequel, there is evidence that Kristin Scott Thomas will reappear. Hope for that is high. The Croft Universe needs her.

See you at the movies!

  susan james