Review: 'Uncharted' is a generic action movie that holds the key to why video-game adaptations never work as movies.

It would be hard to find a movie that’s as much a generic corporate product as “Uncharted,” a paint-by-numbers action-adventure made by one arm of Sony — Columbia Pictures — based on an intellectual property from another arm of Sony, Playstation., and starring another Sony product, Tom Holland, aka Spider-Man.

Holland portrays Nathan Drake, a Manhattan bartender and masterful pickpocket who catches the attention of Victor “call me ‘Sully’” Sullivan (Mark Wahlberg), a smooth-but-shady procurer of things he’s not supposed to procure. Sully wants Nathan to join him on a quest, to find the legendary lost gold of Ferdinand Magellan’s ill-fated circumnavigation of the globe.

Nathan catches on quickly that Sully is not to be trusted. But one thing convinces Nate to sign on: Sully says he knows what happened to Nathan’s brother, Sam — who Nathan hasn’t seen since they were boys, in the orphanage in Boston, getting into trouble and dreaming of adventures like this. (We meet the young brothers — Nate played by Tiernan Jones, Sam played by Rudy Pankow — in the prologue.)

The quest begins with Nathan and Sully trying to steal a bejeweled gold crucifix from an auction house, where tycoon Santiago Moncada (Antonio Banderas) is eager to possess it. Moncada, we’re told, is the scion of the family that bankrolled Magellan’s voyage 500 years ago, and he believes it’s his destiny to reclaim the fortune. Moncada hires a knife-wielding operative, Jo Braddock (Tati Gabrielle, from “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina”), to keep Nathan and Sully out of his way.

After the New York adventure, Nathan and Sully follow the trail to Barcelona — which happens to be Moncada’s base of operations. There, they team up with another thief, Chloe Frazer (Sophia Ali), who knows Sully well enough not to trust him, and assumes Nathan is untrustworthy because he’s with Sully. The bulk of the Barcelona segment involves following clues through an underground maze, with the requisite cobwebs and booby traps. Someone calls someone else “Indiana Jones,” and the audience’s response is: “You wish.”

It goes on like this, as director Ruben Fleischer (“Venom,” “Zombieland”) and a tag-team of screenwriters connect the dots from one action set piece to the next. Exactly one of these action sequences is in any way remarkable, and it’s the one that dominates the movie’s trailer: Nathan hanging onto the netting of a line of cargo containers dangling behind the back door of a plane somewhere over the Philippines. 

The movie might have had a chance, if screenwriters Rate Lee Judkins, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway had given Holland or Wahlberg characters to play instead of one-note cliches — or made Gabrielle’s Braddock something more than an anime figure, or given Banderas anything interesting to work with in his villain role. These aren’t characters, they’re avatars, hollow figures to mark the place someone real should be.

And that, I realized after watching “Uncharted,” is the answer to the question Hollywood has been asking for decades: Why movies based on video games never work. 

When you play the game, you solve the riddle or win the boss battle, and you get to the next cut scene. If you fail, you keep trying again until you succeed, and the cut scene is waiting for you. A movie like “Uncharted” is all cut scenes, with the action connecting the viewer from one to the next — and where’s the surprise in that?

Also, think about it this way: The most interesting character in a video game isn’t Mario or Lara Croft or (for my game of choice, “FIFA 22”) Lionel Messi. The most interesting character is always you, the player. And substituting a movie star in that central role is never as fascinating to you as you are — I don’t care how boyishly handsome Tom Holland is. And when you substitute yourself with a character with no discernible personality, as this movie does with both Holland’s Nate and Wahlberg’s Sully, it’s game over.

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‘Uncharted’

★★

Opens Friday, February 18, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for violence/action and language. Running time: 116 minutes.