“未知”开始,我们看到Tom Holland睡着了,蓝色的年代ky behind him. The image is peaceful, except for the steady, hard-to-place sound of rushing wind. Then he opens his eyes and a split second later, he realizes what we’ve just figured out: He is in the middle of the sky, and falling.
It’s common for adventure movies to begin with a splashy action sequence, but most of the time, we get spectacle for the sake of spectacle. It’s too early to care what’s happening before we knowwhyit’s happening. But this opener is so visceral — this is a place we’ve all visited in our nightmares — that our investment is instantaneous. The start of “Uncharted” is about as effective as can be imagined.
What follows just builds on the situation, until the sequence is abruptly interrupted by a flashback. That usually doesn’t work well, either: Here we were having fun, and now we’re getting thrust back into the boring part of the story. But no, not this time. “Uncharted” takes its foot off the gas, but the video game adaptation doesn’t lose velocity. It stays interesting.
Holland — who is beginning to seem like he can play anything — is Nathan, an orphan who lives by his wits as an adult. His only close relative is his brother, but he hasn’t seen him in years. And then one day, he meets Victor (Mark Wahlberg), who recruits him to help find the lost treasure of Ferdinand Magellan.
This lost treasure is in gold, and there’s a ton of it. Over the course of the movie, Nathan and Victor do their best to find it, but notice this: At no point do they ever have a plan as to how to carry it out. This would seem to be an oversight.
Nathan and Victor follow a series of ridiculous clues that make no apparent sense, each requiring some unlikely intuitive leap that invariably turns out right. This has been the formula for lots of mediocre adventures, so why does the formula work so well this time?
It’s hard to say, but “Uncharted” was directed by Ruben Fleischer, who made “Zombieland: Double Tap” and the first “Venom” — two other genre movies that turned out a little better than they had to.
“Uncharted” benefits from the combination of Holland’s light energy and Wahlberg’s dark energy, Holland’s open-book quality and Wahlberg’s way of making his eyes go opaque. Wahlberg has a funny way of simultaneously making you want to trust him and not trust him at all.
The movie further benefits from Antonio Banderas, as the chief competitor for the treasure. He’s the cold-blooded billionaire descendant of the noble Spanish family that bankrolled Magellan — who else besides Banderas would you get to play somebody like that?
There are also two strong women’s roles — played by Sophia Ali and the San Francisco-born Tati Gabrielle — each thoroughly evil, ready to do anything to get that gold.
Needless to say, “Uncharted” eventually ends up back in the sky, with Holland opening his eyes to find himself in a real-life falling nightmare. Yet somehow the movie manages to top even that.
“Uncharted” isn’t a classic, but for an action movie coming out in the doldrums of February, it’s practically “Citizen Kane.”
M“Uncharted”:Action adventure. Starring Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg. Directed by Ruben Fleischer. (PG-13. 116 minutes.) In theaters starting Friday, Feb. 18.