UNCHARTED

If Uncharted wants to mirror itself on Indiana Jones, it is much closer to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull than any other Indy movie.

These days most would-be franchises open with a sequence that elaborately explains a backstory or neatly outlines the world our hero will be spending the best part of two hours in. Uncharted bucks that trend by opening strikingly in medias res, with the titular treasure hunter dangling mid-air, attached to a falling airplane crate.

That opening minute is about as fresh as the picture gets because all that follows hasn't got a grain of originality in it. If Uncharted wants to mirror itself on Indiana Jones - and clearly that's the goal - it is much closer in quality to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull than to the original trilogy, mixing fuzzily directed set-pieces with cartoonish villains and downright awful, supposedly witty banter between stars Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg.

I could have forgiven this if the treasure hunt for Magellan's lost gold loot had been engaging, but it merely follows familiar tropes, including not-so-surprising betrayals and one not-all-that-shocking character death.

Apparently there is an appetite for this kind of copy-paste filmmaking - a 50 million dollar opening weekend suggests so - but I'm not hungry for more Nathan Drake adventures.

release: 2022

director: Ruben Fleischer

starring: Tom Holland, Mark Wahlberg, Antonio Banderas, Sophia Ali