Uncharted

If you are going to drop in a reference to Indiana Jones in an adventure film consisting of heroes, villains, maps, lost treasure and galivanting around the world you invite an immediate comparison and need to be sure your product (because this is what this film is) can carry that weight.

Based on a PlayStation series of games the film opens with a sequence that has Nathan Drake (Tom Holland) falling out of a plane grabbing hold of the cargo as villains chase after him. The viewer can tick off dumb fun from the off and settle down as we are taken back fifteen years to young Nate and brother Sam (Rudy Pankow) caught stealing a map that could lead to long lost gold.

Sam disappears and we are back in the present with Nate now working in a New York cocktail bar chatting up the clients and stealing from them. It’s here that Victor ‘Sully’ Sullivan (Mark Wahlberg) introduces himself and makes an offer regarding the gold, the map and about his brother.

Thus we embark on a global search for gold and the ships that carried it. This quest requires them to solve puzzles, rummage in secret locations and rooms with their half-in half-out accomplice Chloe (Sophia Ali). There’s a rudimentary villain in Antonio Banderas’s Moncada and a more mendacious though acrobatic one in Braddock (Tati Gabrielle).

As the film settles into puzzle solving and cross-continent hopping mode so the tedium sets in. It is not helped by Holland and Wahlberg having very little chemistry playing quite unsympathetic characters. They may be gym fit, ripped rogues but they are not that lovable, if anything the Adonis perfection distances them.

Ruben Fleischer’s film sports decent effects sequences, but they are to order. This is filmmaking by numbers and it looks bloated. A big problem is that the huge effects on their own can’t carry the two hours running time and it needed more support than the slim storyline and the sketchy characters that the three writers developed.

The fact that Holland’s face dominates the poster, though Wahlberg has equal billing above the title, should tell you something about the thinking surrounding this film coming very soon after the last Spiderman’s colossal takings.