‘Uncharted’ review: Tom Holland’s off-the-map adventure loses the plot

NME

If you’ve seen the trailers for this action-adventure movie based on a popular video game franchise, you’ll know it’s not afraid to go big. There are spectacular scenes showing two old-timey pirate ships being towed through mid-air by helicopters – a visual so outlandish it almost belongs in a boat-based Fast and Furious spin-off. It’s surely not much of a spoiler to say these flying pirate ships form part of Uncharted‘s enjoyably daft climax, which almost justifies its existence as a passable popcorn flick. But sadly, the journey to get there is filled with a lot of plodding nonsense.

The film adaptation of Uncharted was stuck in development hell for so long that Mark Wahlberg was originally due to play the protagonist: Nathan ‘Nate’ Drake, a young fortune hunter who claims to be a descendant of legendary explorer Sir Francis Drake. More than a decade later, he’s aged out of the role and instead portrays Nate’s sketchy mentor, Victor ‘Sully’ Sullivan. This allows Tom Holland, who’s also credited as an executive producer here, to play Nate with his usual earnest charm and limber physicality. At the start of the movie, we see him falling through mid-air, and he’ll do more of this as the story progresses.

Uncharted then darts back in time, showing us Nate working as a New York bartender who skilfully nicks a bracelet from an unsuspecting customer, and Sully watching on from a corner table. Nate is initially wary of the observant stranger, but Sully soon recruits him as his partner on an expedition to track down “the biggest treasure that’s never been found”: lost gold once plundered by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan. Sully’s motives are financial, but for Nate the expedition is personal because he believes it will reunite him with older brother Sam, who left to do some exploring of his own many years earlier. We’re told that since then he’s only heard from Sam by postcard, which is neither the first nor last time this film requires a hefty suspension of disbelief.

Director Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland, Venom) keeps things moving briskly enough as Nate and Sully head to Barcelona, whey they team up with fellow fortune hunter Chloe Frazer (Sophia Ali) and clock their main rival for Magellan’s gold: Moncada, a two-dimensional billionaire with daddy issues played flatly by Antonio Banderas. Actually, it’s pretty much a facsimile of his villainous performance in last year’s The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard. A subterranean treasure hunt through the historic Spanish city offers some Indiana Jones-style fun, but Uncharted doesn’t really spark into life until that ludicrous climax.

The main problem is that none of these characters are ever fleshed out enough to make you invest in them – Moncada’s ass-kicking mercenary Braddock (Tati Gabrielle) is particularly thinly written – or forget the film’s fundamentally ridiculous premise. Holland and Wahlberg gamely try to strike up some banter-y chemistry, but the script saddles them with lame running jokes about Nate chewing gum (wild!) and Sully having too many apps on his phone open. Post-credit scenes signpost with zero subtlety that Uncharted wants to be a franchise. But on this evidence, the journey to box office gold is no foregone conclusion.

The post ‘Uncharted’ review: Tom Holland’s off-the-map adventure loses the plot appeared first on NME.