By Michael O'Sullivan
In the age of Google Maps and Google Earth, it's refreshing, if perhaps also a bit naive, to imagine a world in which certain parts of it might still remain, as the title of a new movie has it, uncharted.
Yet "Uncharted," the action-adventure film inspired by the treasure-hunting video game franchise, is as old-fashioned as the notion of 16th-century Spanish galleons packed with billions of dollars' worth of gold hiding someplace that just hasn't been pinned on a map yet.
The movie opens with, as it were, a bit of truth-in-advertising: a scene, without warning or preamble as to what is going on, that sets the level of preposterousness to which we are about to be treated.
Tom Holland (playing who or what we do not know yet) is shown unconscious and clinging, by his shoe - stuck in the webbing of a large crate - to a chain of enormous parcels that are trailing from the open bay of a cargo plane in mid-air, like a string of giant pearls.
Over the next minute or so, his character wakes up to perform a ballet of derring-do that is as physically improbable as it is fun to watch.
That's assuming that you are of a mind to swallow this load of malarkey. It's as if the movie, directed with cartoonish glee and special dispensation from the law of gravity by Ruben Fleischer of the "Zombieland" films, is saying to us: "If you can't buy this baloney, you might as well stop watching now. It's only going to get worse."
Or better, depending on your mood.
Holland plays Nate Drake, said to be a descendant of the pirate Francis Drake, and the pickpocket-turned-partner of Mark Wahlberg's Victor "Sully" Sullivan, both of whom are in pursuit of bounty that has been hidden by the crew of the explorer Ferdinand Magellan for hundreds of years.
Their competition in the hunt comes from a trio of unscrupulous rivals, played by Antonio Banderas, Tati Gabrielle and Sophia Ali, the latter of whom is Nate and Sully's sometime colleague.
Alliances shift here, like the wind, including that between Nate and Sully (who complains about his bad ankle and failing eyesight, in an amusing nod to the almost 50-year-old Wahlberg's advancing, er, maturity).
What transpires is part heist flick, part "Mission: Impossible"-lite, with a dollop of Dan Brown (for the puzzles), the DNA of Nicolas Cage in "National Treasure" and mildly zingy buddy-banter dressed up with a bit of "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre's" existential darkness.
It's all filmed in Fleischer's signature kinetic style, which culminates in a chase scene between two freight helicopters transporting big wooden boats over the Banda Sea. (True to form for this sort of thing, "Uncharted" globe-trots from New York to Teterboro to Barcelona to the Philippines, though it really takes place entirely in a world of make-believe.)
As for whether it's any good, does it matter?
We've all been cooped up so long, it feels a bit salubrious to imagine flight - not just the aviatic kind, but the flights of fancy that "Uncharted" takes us on.
Far-fetched? Yes. Inconceivable, eye-rolling, absurd too. It also feels a bit unreasonable to expect anything more - or less - from "Uncharted."