Tom Holland plays a youthful Nathan Drake, teaming up for the first time with Mark Wahlberg as his mentor Victor ‘Sully’ Sullivan in this lively Ruben Fleischer-directed take on the hugely-popular PlayStation adventure games. Fans of the games have expressed their displeasure – and how – at the casting of the youthful Holland and the moustacheless (most of the time) Wahlberg as their pixelated heroes, but Sony won’t be losing too much sleep as Holland’s currency is as high as it gets right now with his latest Spider-Man outing powering towards a global $2 billion box office haul. The chances of Uncharted achieving similar success are remote but this is a lively, likeable old-school treasure hunt romp likely to find favour with audiences looking for unsophisticated escapist fare or people who have never heard of Indiana Jones.
Uncharted is actually anything but uncharted; it ploughs cinematic furrows we’ve travelled many times in the past, touching base not only with Harrison Ford’s famous fedora-sporting icon but also Nic Cage’s National Treasure series, Tomb Raider, and pretty much any other feature film where the heroes unfurl a musty rolled-up map. The film kicks off in fine style with a snippet from the sequence where Drake is thrown from a cargo plane and battles gun-wielding thugs and dodges tumbling crates – and even a car – as he somewhat implausibly defies the laws of gravity. We then flashback fifteen years and meet a young Nathan and his brother Sam who pledge to work together to uncover a cache of long-lost pirate treasure. The brothers are torn apart and in the modern-day, Nathan is working as a Tom Cruise-like cocktail barman who indulges in a little bit of pickpocketing on the side. He meets up with Sully, who is looking for a sidekick to help him in his own treasure-hunting quest, and the two pair up and embark on a breakneck globe-trotting quest to locate an eye-watering fortune in legendary lost gold. But hot on their heels is ruthless fellow treasure hunter Moncada (Antonio Banderas), wily fortune hunter Chloe Frazer (Sophia Ali), vaguely placed as Nathan’s love interest, and Braddock (Tati Gabrielle),a mercenary in Moncada’s employ who has her own agenda. The stage is set for two hours of frantic rushing across the world (complete with an onscreen map chronicling their journey with red dots), lots of fights and stunts and implausible jeopardy and bags of double crossing (entirely appropriate as an early Macguffin that powers the plot is, quite literally, a double crucifix).
Uncharted sidesteps any concerns about its almost utter lack of originality by throwing itself with gusto into its narrative at such a pace that you’re unlikely to even question the gaping plot chasms and utter illogicality of the whole thing. Holland and Wahlberg are charming company, uneasy adventurers swapping cheesy one-liners and getting themselves into ever more outrageous scrapes. We revisit the opening sky-high fight scene that manages to take our breath away even though we’re well aware that it’s really just a triumph of green screen. Uncharted really comes alive in its last act and if you’re ever going to throw away your critical faculties and just allow yourself to wallow in the silliness of it all then it’s here, as our heroes and several no-good types descend upon a pair of hidden rotting galleons in readiness for the final high adrenalin confrontation. Uncharted is a big, warm-hearted derivative dose of high adventure nonsense and it almost defies its audience not to enjoy it despite its shortcomings, which, in end, only the most mean-minded are likely to really give too much of a damn about. Stick around for two sequel-baiting mid-credits sequences.
Uncharted is in cinemas now.
