Indiana Jones has nothing to fear from video game lemon
THERE was a time when video games were inspired by feature films; now it tends to be the other way round and Uncharted (★★III, 12A, 116 mins) is the latest example. It is based on the video game series of the same name (reviewed on the next page) and from start to finish feels like an exercise in cashing in so crass and soulless that it might have been written and directed by a computer.
It doesn’t want for big stars, though, with Mark Wahlberg and Tom Holland as a pair of adventurers in search of hidden gold, and Antonio Banderas as the baddie desperate to get to it first. There are some half-decent stunts, but the story is so shamelessly derivative — a rather desperate mash-up of the Indiana Jones movies and The Da Vinci Code — that it’s hard to imagine anyone finding it anything more than utterly forgettable hokum, mildly entertaining at best, but mostly not even that.
Holland plays Nate Drake, New York city bartender and occasional pickpocket, who is persuaded by a rascal called Victor Sullivan (Wahlberg) to help him rob a centuries-old Spanish crucifix from an auction house. The crucifix doubles as a key, which they think will open a vault beneath a church in Barcelona to reveal the billions of dollars worth of gold stashed away by the 15th-century explorer Ferdinand Magellan. Only, guess what, it’s not that simple.
Holland does his best to inject tension and excitement into all this nonsense, while Wahlberg doesn’t try quite as hard. Their ‘witty banter’ repeatedly falls flat, a flimsy sub-plot concerning Nate’s long-lost brother seems like an afterthought, and one direct reference to Indiana Jones feels calculated to spike the guns of those of us about to cry rip-off. But they can’t stop us knowing what a great adventure film looks like, and it’s not this.