Movie Review : Uncharted (2022)
Video game adaptations are notoriously difficult to pull off for one obvious reason no one wants to accept: video game characters are not that interesting when you don’t get to be them. What makes the Uncharted games iconic is that you get to run and gun and climb all sorts of insane, unrealistic platforming sections. Not Nathan Drake. He’s cool, but he’s not that cool. Playstation though he was cool enough to warrant a movie adaptation, though and albeit it has appeal for fans of the games, it’s not exactly good.
Uncharted is a mix of ideas from the video games and original ideas that work well within the framework of its universe. In this iteration, a young Nathan Drake (Tom Holland) is hired by a very different Victor Sullivan (Mark Wahlberg) in order to find Magellan’s hidden treasure. The navigator would’ve hidden a buttload of gold from his expeditions somewhere on the planet and Sully is competing with an unhinged Spaniard from an evil family named Santiago Moncada (Antonio Banderas) for the jackpot.
It kind of works, except it doesn’t
Uncharted goes through great lengths to replicate the kinetic feeling that makes the Playstation games so much fun. It even starts with an iconic scene (from the second game), where Nathan Drake has to climb exploration gear falling from a plane. The "platforming" sequences for lack of a better word feel in general alive and crazy enough that it could be in a game. Ruben Fleischer visibly understands why Uncharted is cool and well worth investing playing hours into. The problem is most definitely not him.
The problem is that if creatively you’re trying to replicate the feeling of playing the actual Uncharted games, why the fuck would you break the illusion by hiring Tom Holland and especially Mark Wahlberg to play the most important parts? Don’t get me wrong, these two men are good at their job but their mere presence breaks the illusion. Sully is not supposed to be a sexy character. He’s supposed to be an old, slimy geek with a mustache who likes Drake way too much. He’s supposed to be a troublemaking sidekick.
Whenever Holland and Wahlberg have to do more than jumping around or firing guns, Uncharted becomes a disposable popcorn movie. If your idea really was to appeal to fans of the game, why not hire a sleazy, good looking Nathan Drake wannabe or fuck, even a digitally de-aged Nolan North? That would’ve worked. Uncharted, like a lot of flagship projects from people who are not used to run flagship projects, is very confused about what it is and what it is trying to be and it affects the experience.
The art of half-assing everything
Another thing that bugged me about Uncharted is all the time it spent on Nathan Drake’s origin story. He’s never been all that fun or relatable, but eschewing the family history with Francis Drake and making him a hustling bartender are such inexplicable boilerplate decision that would’ve absolutely murdered any movie that didn’t have a franchise inherent value attached to it. Nathan Drake is a boilerplate hero in the games and he takes his meaning when he’s on the move. No one cares that he’s an orphan.
Uncharted is a greedy movie. It wants to be a complete moviegoing experience while the product at its heart is a flawed proposition. Had it stayed the course with the galloping action scenes and conspiracy-fueled storyline and treated conventional storytelling with the appropriate contempt, it could’ve been the weird mix of Indiana Jones and John Wick it should’ve been. But Uncharted tripped and landed head first in its own desire for normalcy and ended up tragically half-assing everything.
*
Uncharted was the last movie I watched on the plane coming back from Armenia. You know that a plane movie is not getting the job done when you’re pausing it twice to sleep a little between acts. By knowing exactly what its good at and very obviously not being at peace with it, Uncharted ended up being a series of killer action scenes spliced by the most generic underdog narrative you can find on the market. If anything, Uncharted shows you video games adaptations can be done right. It just doesn’t do it.
