Uncharted — Tom Holland hunts treasure in game-turned-film

X marks the spot more than once for wannabe movie franchise-starter Uncharted. The film has a treasure chest of intellectual property: the hugely popular PlayStation game of the same name and its fortune-hunter hero, Nate Drake. Another lucky break finds the character played by Tom Holland, one-man saviour of Hollywood after the recent outsize success of Spider-Man: No Way Home.

The translation into movies makes Drake a roguish Manhattan pickpocket drawn into searching for Spanish gold by Mark Wahlberg’s veteran adventurer. Here too, the project hits the jackpot. When the movie version was first mooted in 2008, Wahlberg himself was to have played the lead. Development hell did the film a favour. Holland brings the character a nimble likeability Wahlberg never would have, as well as his army of Spider-fans (or so backers Sony will hope).

All that promise and the movie blows it. The uneasy fusion of game and film is one snag. Director Ruben Fleischer makes only fitful attempts to do something interesting with the visual language of gaming. More often, he cuts and pastes Drake into a bland green-screen globetrot with the tang of young adult fiction. Oddly, the plot is where Uncharted feels most like gameplay. Long scenes involve ornate keys being tried in locks. Maps are lost, found, carried about.

Holland earns his corn; just because he is practised in mixing action, wisecracks and minor-key backstories doesn’t make it easy. But Wahlberg clearly sees his own professional mortality every time he looks at his co-star. The movie feels uptight, joyless even when riffing on much-loved old favourites. If you can’t actually enjoy lifting bits from Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jackie Chan’s Police Story, you should leave them where you found them.

★★☆☆☆

In UK cinemas from February 11 and US cinemas from February 18