Uncharted, 2022.
Directed by Ruben Fleischer.
Starring Tom Holland, Mark Wahlberg, Sophia Ali, Tati Gabrielle, and Antonio Banderas.
SYNOPSIS:
Street-smart Nathan Drake, is recruited by seasoned treasure hunter, Victor “Sully” Sullivan, to recover a fortune amassed by Ferdinand Magellan, and lost 500 years ago by the House of Moncada.
In 2007, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune revolutionized the video game industry by delivering a gaming experience that, by most accounts, played like a movie. With dedicated performers (whose names would subsequently become attached to the characters they voiced) and a penchant for story-driven action and dialogue, Naughty Dog cracked a formula that long-puzzled game developers; it became a crowning example of how to capture that silver screen magic on home consoles. Now, in 2022, Sony and director Ruben Fleischer have the opposite objective: to give Uncharted fans a viewing experience that feels, in part, like the beloved video game.
After years of floating around in development hell and release date purgatory (thanks Covid), Uncharted is finally starting to roll out on screens around the globe — with Sony hoping to capitalize off of the post-Spider-Man: No Way Home momentum of its star, Tom Holland. And while it’s being released into a box office playing field where few non-established cinematic IPs are breaking out, Uncharted, for better or worse, feels familiar. No, it’s not a Marvel movie, but it’s particularly well-suited for a landscape where Marvel films are the most reliably dominant force at the box office.
The film follows Holland’s Nathan Drake, who we meet as a street-smart bartender using his quick-wit and sleight-of-hand skills to pickpocket and hustle his way through life in New York City. His talents are recognized by Mark Wahlberg’s fortune-hunting Sully, a former associate of Drake’s older brother, who is in pursuit of a major score: treasure hidden by the crew of 16th century explorer Ferdinand Magellan. The two reluctantly team up on a dangerous, globe-spanning, occasionally swashbuckling adventure to track down the treasure before it falls into the hands of their sinister competition (played by Antonio Banderas and Tati Gabrielle).
Even for those unfamiliar with the PlayStation games, it’s a strikingly easy premise for audiences, who for years have been primed on the cinematic outings of Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, to buy into; and it’s largely a ‘what you see is what you get’ studio programmer.
It’s appearance as a fairly traditional treasure-hunting movie leaves room for some well-earned surprises, but just as often, it struggles to exist outside of the shadow cast by the much better movies of its same ilk.
The biggest notch in the film’s belt is its action sequences, which teeter on the brink of realism, with the same occasional disregard for logic that makes the Fast & Furious films so watchable. Uncharted subscribes to the rule of escalating action — each action set-piece must be larger in scale and stakes than the previous one — and is better for it, queueing up some effectively tense moments and visually diverse backdrops for its treasure-hunting shenanigans.
While even a video game franchise as well-regarded as Uncharted will occasionally face criticism for its conventional plotting and contrived witticisms, it has never been accused of faltering on its action. Credit where credit is due, Fleischer aptly delivers the goods, not being afraid to go as cartoonishly big as the source material demands. Uncharted is operating safely and unassumingly within its wheelhouse, until it gives audiences a fight scene on dangling airplane cargo or an aerial pirate ship battle — the kind of elastic action befitting a video game.
In a disappointing turn of events, the movie is mostly held back by Holland and Wahlberg. Despite some genuine, well-intentioned effort from the former, Holland just isn’t a movie star yet. He is certainly on that path, and he may very well have the talent, but here he lacks the charisma to do Drake justice and, generally, any sense of fortuity in his performance. Holland is a little too carefully practiced; he struggles to reconcile the side of his character that is young and out-of-his-depths, with the part of the character that he knows should be light on his feet and, all around, cool. The result is a safe, clunky performance that’s light on personality.
Wahlberg’s shtick here too is a little washed up. You can see the wheels turning in his head of how he can make his Sully the coolest guy in the room, when by all means he shouldn’t be. He and Holland make for a mismatched duo, ultimately lacking the chemistry and dynamism that you would hope to see from the iconic pair of characters.
The Uncharted games are notable for their levity, but that doesn’t forgive the script’s sickeningly quippy, “Marvel-ized” humor that Holland and Wahlberg struggle to sell with any real flavor. One can’t help but feel that it’s the kind of obligatory, stale humor that works better in a video game, where audiences are more forgiving of substandard banter. After Sully’s nth joke about Drake’s unmanly drinks of choice or Drake finding a new angle for a ‘Sully is old’ jab, the humor really begins to box the core character relationships in well-worn, unremarkable territory.
Given its long road to the multiplexes, by most estimations, Uncharted is a stronger outing than expected. Even if the two lead performances are limp, it doesn’t fall victim to the melodramatic, long-winded, lore-obsessed narrative plotting that can typically plague a movie like this (ahem, 2018’s Tomb Raider). Uncharted doesn’t have a command over its audience like Raiders of the Lost Ark, the visual flare of Pirates of the Caribbean, or even the engrossing story antics of National Treasure, but it drills down on being simple, stupid fun and mostly succeeds. Of course, the entire exercise is relatively inconsequential, considering that there are five stellar Uncharted games on the market that surely rival the best of this movie’s thrills, but that approaches a more existential question about the ‘video game movie curse.’ We won’t see a truly stellar video game adaptation until studio executives really interrogate the questions of ‘Why make this?’ or ‘How can filmmaking enrich this source material?’
But in an industry where video game movies based off of hugely popular source material are still the underdog, movies like this just barely provide enough reason to keep pursuing that gold.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Justin Cook
