Tom Holland vs. Tom Cruise

I n Uncharted, Tom Holland is trying to be Tom Cruise, but he should heed the lesson of Tom Hanks.

Hanks, after Road to Perdition, decided he was incapable of being scary, so he reverted to nice-guy parts. Holland’s explorer, Nate Drake, is a cocky smartass on a worldwide treasure hunt, and it doesn’t work at all. There’s a scene where he’s pouring wine like the suave international jewel thief he’s supposed to be, and something inside you goes, “Nooooo!” Tom Holland isn’t old enough to drink wine. He’ll never be old enough to drink wine. I’m afraid he’s stuck with nice-kid roles, possibly forever. We all have our limitations, and Holland’s is that he’s completely adorable.

Not that Holland (who even does a slick-barman routine straight out of Cruise’s Cocktail) is the only problem with the movie, which is terrible. Soullessly directed by the talented Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland) in I’m-doing-the-best-I-can mode, the film is based on a video game, and it shows in every scene. In a video game, you expect to wander from one set piece to another and stumble across amazing stuff as a matter of routine. In a movie, the writers actually have to engineer plausible connections to link the amazing stuff, and three screenwriters (Rafe Lee Jenkins, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway) flail at every turn. Also, their idea of wisecracking badinage is about as lively as peat moss, and even if it were sharp, I’m not sure it would work for Holland, who lacks the rat-terrier aggression that his character is supposed to have. Mark Wahlberg had it in The Departed and tries to revive it here, to middling effect.

Holland plays a young orphan whose beloved older brother and mentor goes off to seek adventure when both are teens, each of them obsessed with treasure maps and 16th-century explorers. They believe a legend that, before he died while circumnavigating the globe, Ferdinand Magellan left ships full of gold hidden somewhere on earth, which sets up a Da Vinci Code/National Treasure plot in which historical artifacts and texts must be unearthed and decoded in order to create a point-by-point guide to a tantalizing secret. Globe, prepare to be trotted upon.

The older brother, unseen for most of the movie, helps out with the quest by sending postcards (possibly in code) from exotic locales. A chance encounter between the brother and another adventurer, Victor Sullivan (Wahlberg), who has access to a golden cross that might be one of the two keys to the treasure, leads Sully to track down Nate for help in stealing the second cross from a ritzy auction house in New York City. But this will require outsmarting a nefarious Spanish plutocrat who intends to buy the cross in the auction. This character is played without wit or even much energy by Antonio Banderas (as my ten-year-old noted, “Hey, that’s Puss in Boots!”). His henchwoman is a stone-cold killer named Braddock (Tati Gabrielle), while another badass female treasure seeker (Sophia Ali) alternately works with and against the others for her own purposes.

This wouldn’t be much of a problem in a video game, but Nate, Sully, and the two ladies all have far too many skills; even though Nate works as a bartender, all four leads are essentially James Bond and Indiana Jones rolled into one, figuring out obscure scholarly clues on the run, piloting helicopters and speedboats, surviving falls out of airplanes, etc. The emphasis on rushing from one gamer thrill to the next creates big plot holes. Acquiring the precious cross, for instance, is dependent on Wahlberg’s character suddenly quick-changing into the exact right uniform at an auction house, his face being instantly forgotten by staff who have just watched him bid publicly for the prize, and on a fellow auction worker being dumb enough to simply hand him, a total stranger, the goods.

Random terrifying stuff doesn’t faze any of the quartet of treasure hunters, which makes the whole movie thin and desperate and lacking in human drama. Every problem merits an increasingly farfetched solution: If you tried to pick up a ship that had been sitting in water for 500 years, I suspect the thing would crumble to sawdust. Yet none of the action comes with either the archness of James Bond or the Looney Tunes madness of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. It’s impossible to get swept up in the quest the way we were in Raiders of the Lost Ark when the plotting is ragged and haphazard rather than precise and logical. The key art for Uncharted makes it look like a straight-to-video action flick from about 1988, and that’s pretty much exactly what it is.