116 min | PG-13 | February 18, 2022 | Columbia Pictures
A bartender with light fingers gets pulled into a hunt for gold that Magellan’s crew hid five hundred years ago. Tom Holland climbs, Mark Wahlberg squints, and the clues unlock right on schedule. It assembles every part of the treasure-hunt genre and forgets to bury anything worth finding.
Nathan Drake is a bartender and small-time thief with a gift for history and sleight of hand. Victor Sullivan recruits him to chase a fortune that Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition hid five centuries ago. The film wants to be an origin story for a younger, scrappier treasure hunter than the ones it borrows from. It assembles every component of the globe-trotting adventure genre and snaps them together with no friction and no surprise. The result is a movie about the search for buried gold that has nothing buried inside it.
Tom Holland plays Nathan Drake with the same nimble charm he brings to Spider-Man, and the agility translates well to the climbing and the brawling. He sells the wonder of a kid who reads about lost cities and now stands inside one. Mark Wahlberg plays Sully as a gruff mercenary who lies to everyone and trusts no one, and his rapport with Holland never warms past transactional banter. Sophia Ali plays Chloe Frazer as a rival who switches allegiances on a schedule the plot dictates. Antonio Banderas plays Santiago Moncada, a villain hunting his own ancestral claim, and the script discards him before he can do anything. Tati Gabrielle plays Jo Braddock as the real muscle, cold and efficient where the men are merely loud.
Ruben Fleischer directs from a script by Rafe Judkins, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway, and the seams of three writers show in the lurching tone. The action set pieces are engineered rather than staged. A cargo plane sequence has Drake dangling from crates that tumble out the back, and the obvious digital compositing drains the height of any weight or danger. The same weightlessness infects the finale, where two galleons swing through the air on helicopters and the physics dissolve into pixels. Fleischer shoots the puzzle-solving in flat coverage that treats every clue as a checkpoint to clear.
This is a film that mistakes references for invention. It points at Indiana Jones and National Treasure and assumes the gesture is enough. The puzzles unlock on cue, the double-crosses arrive on schedule, and the banter fills the silence between mechanical thrills. It moves and it gleams and it leaves nothing behind once the gold is found.