Uncharted, review: Mark Wahlberg fits this role like a ballgown fits an orangutan
If some pitiless sadist fed a copy of The Da Vinci Code through the Hollywood Marveliser, Uncharted could easily be the result. Spun off from a popular series of PlayStation games, it’s a plastic archeological swashbuckler which goes through the genre’s motions with all the elegance and verve of a glazed-over gamer Pavlovically prodding the buttons on his joypad.
Fresh-ish from Spider Man: No Way Home (though in fact Uncharted was shot first, during the first year of the pandemic), Tom Holland stars as Nathan ‘Nate’ Drake, a direct descendent of Sir Francis – or so his parents told him, before whatever tragic event left him and his elder brother Sam in an orphanage, from where the two steal out under cover of darkness to relieve a local museum of its antiquities.
Fast forward into Nate’s early adulthood and Sam’s gone AWOL, while our still fairly young hero is mixing drinks in a chic New York bar while picking the pockets of its bourgeois clients.
Enter, with a clunk, Mark Wahlberg, jarringly miscast as debonair treasure hunter Victor Sullivan, who enlists Nate in his search for a legendary cache of gold hidden somewhere or other by the crew of the Magellan expedition, and never seen again for 500 years.
As a blue-collar stoic or preening meathead Wahlberg can be terrifically good value, but he proves about as natural a fit for a suave surrogate father figure as would a ballgown for an orangutan, and the very thought of him leading young Nate into a cutthroat netherworld of ruthless artefact collectors doesn’t ring true for a moment.
Nor, sad to say, does the netherworld itself, which largely consists of Antonio Banderas’s gravelly oligarch and his small team of henchmen, one of whom is armed with a non-native Scottish accent which – hoots, mon – even Russ Abbot might have deemed a touch de trop.
Banderas’s character is the kind of strategic mastermind who will murder an enemy in broad daylight in a car park beside a major tourist hotspot – while a plot twist that feels more like the result of a scheduling clash than screenwriter daring leaves him offscreen for the film’s entire third act, during which Tati Gabrielle’s Braddock, a knife-toting mercenary, finds herself promoted to villain-in-chief by default.
At this point, things mercifully warm up a bit. The climactic action sequence, which takes place across two ancient galleons as they're airlifted from an island cave to a waiting cargo ship, is a nice idea well executed, even if the scene’s improbable physics attest to Uncharted's video-game roots.
Elsewhere, the action is dire from every angle: lots of pushing artefact A onto plinth B in order to make secret door C wobble open.
There’s also a fight in and outside an aeroplane’s cargo hold in the rough style of the iconic stunt from The Living Daylights, which the film is evidently so pleased with that it shows it off twice: once in truncated form in a quick flash-forward prologue, then again in full when it occurs in the course of the plot around two thirds of the way through the film.
But every frame is so obviously green-screened, airbrushed and otherwise climate-controlled that it unfolds without a squeak of peril – the stakes couldn’t have felt lower if an extra-life counter were sitting in the corner of the screen. As for the script, you can almost hear the words NEEDS TO BE FUNNIER written in capital letters in the margins at least once per scene.
Even as a test of Holland’s star power beyond the Marvel franchise, Uncharted feels like an ill-advised choice. He’s just too lamblike to convince as an open-shirted heartthrob in the Harrison Ford mould, and his chemistry with Sophia Ali, who plays on-off adventuring partner Chloe, is foot-shufflingly meek.
Of course, when a whole generation of stars have been purpose-grown for franchises that shrink in horror from human sensuality, this is the embarrassing result. Buried treasure in the Philippines is all well and good, but wait until you hear about sex.
12A cert, 116 min. In cinemas now
