Mark Reviews Movies: UNCHARTED

Uncharted, Sony Pictures Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 17, 2022

Of all the video games out there, the Uncharted series might be the ones most suitable for a movie adaptation—or two or three or more, as this initial go is clearly setting up at least one sequel. For those who don't know, the games follow the adventures of a treasure hunter through various exotic locales and ruins of reality or legend.

While the stories are fairly typical, the characters— especially the jokey, likeably cocky, and self-aware hero—and their relationships are strongly developed. While there's a lot of exploring, there's also plenty of running, jumping, climbing, fighting, and shooting. Some of the action setpieces in the games often rivaled or topped whatever Hollywood blockbusters in theaters around the same time were giving us.

The games, in other words, were already pretty "cinematic," so a movie adaptation was more or less inevitable (as well as redundant, which is an entirely different conversation). Now, we get Uncharted, which definitely gives us the basic structure and general outline of the source material. The plot does exactly what it needs to do, connecting various characters and getting them from one locale to the next, but it's not until the third act—well past the point of when the movie should have figured it out—that the movie starts to develop a real sense of personality.

The movie begins in the middle of one of its two over-the-top action sequences, as our daring adventurer Nathan Drake (Tom Holland) is caught to the strap of piece of cargo—that just happens to be hanging from a plane mid-flight. Everything slows considerably and for a considerable amount of time after that tease of a flash-forward prologue. In a flashback, we learn that, as kids, Nathan and his older brother, both orphaned, dreamed of searching for the lost gold of Ferdinand Magellan, until their museum burglary got the brother in trouble with the cops, forcing him to go on the run.

Fifteen years later, Nathan works as a bartender at an upscale bar in New York City, making some extra money by swiping valuables from his wealthy and privileged clientele. Victor "Sully" Sullivan (Mark Wahlberg) spots the young man's talent and offers him a chance to participate in some high-stakes thievery. When Nathan learns that the loot is a golden cross, which could be one of the keys to finding Magellan's gold and potentially learning the fate of his brother, he accepts the job.

After the barely successful robbery, which has Nathan joking about a goon's thick Scottish brogue and swinging from some light fixtures, the rest the plot follows the usual globe-trotting and puzzle-solving formula of so many similar adventures. A trip to Barcelona sends Nathan, Sully, and fellow thief/treasure hunter Chloe Frazer (Sophia Ali) through the catacombs of a church, some hidden tunnels beneath the city streets, and through a series of traps. All the while, the trio are being pursued by Santiago Moncada (Antonio Banderas), whose ancestors funded Magellan's expedition (not to mention the Crusades, the Inquisition, and fascism in Spain), and Sully's former accomplice-turned-foe Jo Braddock (Tati Gabrielle).

The games got away with the familiarity, not only because of the medium's interactive element, but also because of the characters' self-aware, devil-may-care, and sarcastic attitude, which is present to some extent here. Because of the setup of these characters meeting and figuring out each other for the first time, though, much of the chemistry between Nathan and Sully is decidedly muted. It doesn't help that both Holland, clearly trying to prove his leading-man action hero chops, and Wahlberg, showing mumbling disinterest in the amount of exposition his character has to spout, frequently have an air of self-seriousness about themselves. That eventually changes, although it's not until the movie's mid-credits scene that the characters and the actors seem to find their rapport.

The screenplay (written by Rafe Lee Judkins, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway) often feels as if it's simply going through the motions, hoping that a couple of jokes might be enough distraction from just how routine the plot's clue-finding, location-hopping, and betrayal-filled specifics actually are. It's not, and without the sense of fun that these characters might have brought to the material, there's little comedic weight to the occasional knowing wink at or undermining of the clichéd mechanics here (Sully, for example, finds a centuries-old piece of an elaborate puzzle now to be part of the décor of a pizza joint).

Throughout the movie, we can sense what the screenwriters and director Ruben Fleischer are attempting to do in terms of the characters and the humor. It only starts to click, though, during the extended climax, which is an admirably goofy and rather clever sequence that has masted ships engaging in a sea battle—only flying high above the water (The overblown spectacle of it is enough that one might wish the makers of the games had thought of it first). Even if Uncharted doesn't live up to its own potential, it does leave us with a little hope by the end for what could come next.

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