Forget ‘Street Fighter,’ This Underrated Video Game Reboot Is a Streaming Sensation

Published Oct 22, 2026, 12:55 AM EDT

Collier Jennings is an entertainment journalist with extensive experience. Collier, or “CJ” to his friends and family, is a dedicated fan of genre films - particularly science fiction, fantasy, and comic book adaptations, not to mention all forms of animation. This stems from a close bond with his father, who introduced him to these genres via copies of X-Men comics and reruns of the original Ultraman series. With his near-encyclopedic knowledge and bottomless love of genre, he’s tackled a wide variety of articles.

Last week, another video game reboot madea splash, with ***Street Fighter ***taking the number one spot at the box office. It’s a surprising outcome, given that *Street Fighter *received mostly mixed reviews. Most critics, including Collider’s Aidan Kelley, noted that while Street Fighter captures the over-the-top fights and signature moves that make the original video games so iconic, it stumbles with certain casting choices and the story. But while Street Fighter may have punched its way to a box-office victory, another video game adaptation is currently capturing audience attention on Netflix.

The movie is Tomb Raider,released in 2018. While the first *Tomb Raider *movie featured **Angelina Jolie **as the legendary treasure hunter Lara Croft, this new version cast **Alicia Vikander **in the role. It also draws more inspiration from the 2013 *Tomb Raider *reboot, with Lara setting out on a journey to find her missing father (Dominic West) and running afoul of Mathias Vogel (Walton Goggins). As of this writing, *Tomb Raider *has cracked Netflix’s Top 10 movies list, according to FlixPatrol. It’s no surprise, as this is one of the more underrated video game movies out there.

The fun of watching *Tomb Raider *is seeing how Lara Croft grows into the daring treasure hunter fans know and love. When she’s first introduced in the movie, Lara throws herself into danger: a high-octane bike chase leads to her arrest, and she enters kickboxing matches where she takes down opponents twice her size. That experience lends itself well to some incredible action sequences, which director **Roar Uthaug **stages with expert precision. Lara leaps from the wreckage of a ship as it plummets down a waterfall and takes down heavily armored opponents with arrows.

It also doesn’t hurt that Alicia Vikander** turns in a great performance as Lara**. She holds her own against Goggins, who threatens to steal the show, and has a great rapport with Daniel Wu, who portrays the sailor who takes her to the island where her father is held hostage. She also shows plenty of emotion beyond being an action heroine, particularly in a scene where Lara is emotionally shaken after having to kill one of Vogel’s men. Vikander’s gift for emotional depth served her well in her breakout role in Ex Machina, and it serves her particularly well in Tomb Raider.

Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive the trilogy, and probably headline it.

You are precision with a grudge. You don’t posture, you don’t escalate, and you don’t warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are so careful never to be the reason you start.

You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about: the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and you’d drive through a building for any one of them.

You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself anyway. It looks like control, but it’s really responsibility. You have never worked out how to ask somebody else to carry the risk.

You are not the most trained person in the building, the best equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.

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