Uncharted review – video game adaptation swerves the joy of the series

The latest attempt to fix the long-running curse of video game movie adaptations arrives in the form of Uncharted, a serviceable but uninspired blockbuster that seems allergic to risk-taking, based on a landmark video game franchise that did anything but rest on its laurels. As such, it feels unshakeably like something from ten or fifteen years ago – a safe, box-ticking “product” that never seems to understand what made Uncharted so appealing in the first place.

If you've played any of the Indiana Jones-inspired games, which usually hinge on the hunt for a priceless lost artefact and a supernatural climax, you'll know what makes them great: the blend of crazy set-pieces, sharp writing, unexpected emotional twists, and characters you genuinely care about – none of which are on display here. The plot, which picks and chooses aspects from across the span of the game series at the cost of an organic story, involves the attempted acquisition of lost Spanish gold, though it's impossible to keep your interest peaked in any of the specifics.

The apathetic script aside, the most obvious and derailing issue here is the casting: Tom Holland, essentially reprising his role as Peter Parker, bears no resemblance to Nathan Drake in looks or manner, even when envisioned as a young version, while Mark Wahlberg – playing Drake's sardonic mentor Victor “Sully” Sullivan – is on autopilot. A key element of the games was the increasingly complex relationship between these characters, but Holland and Wahlberg never capture the back-and-forth chemistry required to give the movie the sardonic charm it so desperately requires.

The film, helmed by Zombieland's Ruben Fletcher, is most fun when it leans into the outrageousness of the games' elaborate set-pieces, especially during a finale that involves a flying pirate ship. But ten minutes of basically any Uncharted game offers more excitement and emotional wallop than this. The characters, ironically, wind up feeling less human than their digital counterparts. And once again, this is a video game adaptation that tries to appeal to a wider audience by being less specific, failing to realise that a more specific movie would appeal to both types of viewer equally.

Only a brief post-credits scene seems to get the tone right, with Wahlberg suddenly looking and acting more like Sully, the giddy, unpredictable feel of the games suddenly on full display. But you wonder why we couldn't have just started here instead of with an origin story. The movie, in a play not uncommon in this day and age, seems way more interested in setting up a long-running franchise, but offers little evidence as to why we'd actually want one.

Of course, the movie is designed to appeal to newcomers as well as fans, which means many will go in with little notion of how it fails the series on which it was based. But even the unfamiliar are likely to watch this and wonder why Uncharted is lauded by video game aficionados; what we have here just seems like a wonky composite of age-old tropes. There are far worse video game movies, yet with such an inherently cinematic series at their disposal, it's hard to escape the feeling the filmmakers missed a chance at striking some gold of their own.

Uncharted is now in UK cinemas.