Who charted?
Video game adaptations are, one sometimes suspects, inherently doomed. Either the source material doesn't have any story and so one has to be welded on crudely, or it has enough story to cover a 20-hour experience that has to be basically started from scratch to fit feature length, and in either case, the story is designed to be experienced actively as you push buttons and solve puzzles and interact with the environment, rather than passively as you sit there watching a screen. Either way, the Uncharted franchise would seem to be a uniquely good candidate for translation to the big screen. Can you write an overt knock-off of an Indiana Jones movie? Congratulations, you have the only skill set required to write a successful Uncharted adaptation.
This would itself appear to have been outside the means of the screenwriters who were actually tasked with the Uncharted screenplay that has, at long last, made its way into theaters after several abortive attempts leading to a successful one that was shut down on the first day of shooting by the pandemic (Rafe Lee Judkins and Art Marcum & Matt Holloway ended up with the screenplay credit, but this is a "written by an ever-changing committee as it ground its way through Development Hell" type of picture if ever I saw one). I do not feel like I can judge Uncharted too harshly, in other words; it had a hell of a time getting just to this point, and it's easy to take pity on it.
Not so much pity that I can see my way to pretending that it's any damn good, mind you. The film is as flavorless and routine as they come, right from its in medias res opening, as a young adventurer who we'll eventually learned is named Nathan Drake (Tom Holland) rouses himself from a dazed state to find that he's dangling out the open hatch of a cargo plan high above the Banda Sea, over the outer reaches of the Philippines. From here we jump back 15 years to Nathan's orphanage days, and then back ahead to find him a New York bartender, razzle dazzling his clientele (or at least trying to) with his flashy cocktail mixing skills. And this is where he's discovered by grizzled treasure hunter Victor "Sully" Sullivan (Mark Wahlberg), who believes - correctly, as it turns out - that Nathan has the right combination of skills, insight, and curiosity to help him find the long-lost golden hoard of the Magellan expedition.
To deal with the easy part first: there is pretty much only one requirement I can think of that the actor cast as Nathan Drake needs to fulfill: he has to be older than his 20s. Part of the charm of the Uncharted games - it is identical to part of the charm of Indiana Jones, and this is pretty much universally true of any charms of the Uncharted games - is that Nathan is a weathered adult who has been doing this for a while, and has built up the knowledge base and the street smarts to be a crafty, quick-thinking adventurer, along with the fatigue to be a cynical asshole about it. We can maybe say that the movie is meant to be an origin story, but that's pretty much the only option. Even allowing that the realities of the film marketplace dictate that we need a 25-year-old Nathan Drake, Tom Holland is a freakishly young-looking 25. Cynicism is profoundly unconvincing coming out of his mouth, and hard-won world-weary wisdom just feels like elfin puckishness. Not that you can't make a good Indiana Jones knock-off with Holland in the lead; but I think you cannot, in fact, make a good Uncharted movie with him.
So that's where we starting from: Uncharted isn't really "Uncharted", and the sooner you agree that you're just there to watch a generic treasure hunting adventure, the happier you'll be. This then leads to the much, much bigger problem than Holland's baby face: this isn't, in fact, a good Indiana Jones knock-off. It's quite a lifeless film altogether, in fact, one that can't even have fun with its globe-trotting premise. Which, for the record, shuttles Nathan and Sully from New York to Barcelona to the Philippines, racing the vicious and greedy Santiago Moncada (Antonio Banderas), last scion of the wealthy family that funded Magellan's voyage, and his nefarious henchwoman Jo Braddock (Tati Gabrielle), who has some manner of undisclosed but violent past with Sully. In the middle we find Chloe Frazer (Sophia Ali), who also has an undisclosed past with Sully that doesn't seem violent, but doesn't really seem friendly; she's also a treasure hunter, and Nathan is instantly smitten with her, and she's not remotely above using this fact to manipulate him.
So anyway, that's a surprisingly small list of places, but it offers up enough variety, especially since the film's layover in Barcelona pulls out quite a few playful locations, including ancient Roman tunnels that have, much to the characters' confusion, been turned into a hip dance club and/or a Papa John's. And as it so happens, Papa John's does in fact operate in Spain, and apparently does quite a business there, though this does not in the slightest distract from how nakedly this entire sequence is a protracted bit of product placement, and the attempts at making some kind of joke about it just makes the whole thing much, much more irritating. But anyways, the Barcelona chunk of the movie is absolutely where Uncharted comes the closest to being its best self: an adventure through fancifully designed sets that house death traps and puzzles. And even here, the film is a little bit soft and disappointing; the puzzles are extremely straightforward, generally require that Nathan be able to read something and immediately determine the second-most straightforward way to interpret it. So in addition to not being Indiana Jones, we're not even able to rise up to National Treasure.
Still, it's only merely insubstantial as an archaeological treasure hunt. Where it really, really falls apart is as an action spectacle. This is already something it's not trying to be very hard: there are surprisingly few action setpieces for an overt Indiana Jones knock-off, given that Raiders of the Lost Ark is at least partially responsible for the very concept of "action setpieces" as something that exist to give structure to action movies. And the ones we get are all bad. Not even in a bright and exciting way, where they're messy and noisy and incoherent; they're just boring. I'm sure the pandemic was at least partially responsible, but Uncharted feels very much like the kind of movie that was mostly completed in pre-visualization, with all of the big action scenes involving crazy moving virtual cameras and lots of CGI moving parts and big scope but never a sense of big scale. Holland and his stunt doubles are so clearly detached from the action around them that it never even feels exciting; I can't even say "it feels like a video game", because that's a comparison that Uncharted very specifically fails to live up to. The Uncharted games have dazzling, physically unlikely stunts and chaos; the movie can't even make a free-fall sequence feel terribly exciting, since it makes such bland choices about where to put the camera and how unpleasantly loud to mix the sound effects track.
The one chance this might have had to redeem itself would be on the backs of its characters. And it comes, honestly, kind of close. Holland and Wahlberg are both painfully miscast in the roles they've been given (Wahlberg as Nathan, right here in 2022, wouldn't be a terrible choice, but that's not what we've been given), but they're not terrible within the limits of the writing and that miscasting. I tire of seeing Holland try very hard to play grown-up; he's too fragile-looking to support the amount of muscle he's built up, and his features too soft and round to make it feel authentic when he cusses and leers sexually. But quipping in front of CGI is much closer to his comfort zone than the godawful Cherry, and he carries it off tolerably well. Neither he nor Wahlberg is helped by how perfunctory much of the film's writing is - the characters slide in and out of being exposition boxes several times over the course of the film - but they both conceptually understand where the sarcastic beats in the script are, and they both hit them.
This does not, unfortunately, allow them to rise up to the level of "bantering". Indeed, I don't think that Holland and Wahlberg are playing off of each other much at all: the plot situates them as an antagonist odd couple who nevertheless keep falling into rhythm with each other, and this just doesn't... happen. Perhaps it's because the quipping is so generic and pro forma (this film is unusually bad at giving its characters distinct personalities or distinguishable speech patterns, and a shocking number of the "jokes" are basically just people saying something unexceptional in an arch tone of voice) that it didn't encourage them to treat it as a fencing match, but just something to get through. Whatever the case, it doesn't feel like two people bouncing off of each other, but two actors delivering well-rehearsed lines. And that completely robs Uncharted of any of the bright, fresh feeling that's at the heart of any good popcorn movie.
This would itself appear to have been outside the means of the screenwriters who were actually tasked with the Uncharted screenplay that has, at long last, made its way into theaters after several abortive attempts leading to a successful one that was shut down on the first day of shooting by the pandemic (Rafe Lee Judkins and Art Marcum & Matt Holloway ended up with the screenplay credit, but this is a "written by an ever-changing committee as it ground its way through Development Hell" type of picture if ever I saw one). I do not feel like I can judge Uncharted too harshly, in other words; it had a hell of a time getting just to this point, and it's easy to take pity on it.
Not so much pity that I can see my way to pretending that it's any damn good, mind you. The film is as flavorless and routine as they come, right from its in medias res opening, as a young adventurer who we'll eventually learned is named Nathan Drake (Tom Holland) rouses himself from a dazed state to find that he's dangling out the open hatch of a cargo plan high above the Banda Sea, over the outer reaches of the Philippines. From here we jump back 15 years to Nathan's orphanage days, and then back ahead to find him a New York bartender, razzle dazzling his clientele (or at least trying to) with his flashy cocktail mixing skills. And this is where he's discovered by grizzled treasure hunter Victor "Sully" Sullivan (Mark Wahlberg), who believes - correctly, as it turns out - that Nathan has the right combination of skills, insight, and curiosity to help him find the long-lost golden hoard of the Magellan expedition.
To deal with the easy part first: there is pretty much only one requirement I can think of that the actor cast as Nathan Drake needs to fulfill: he has to be older than his 20s. Part of the charm of the Uncharted games - it is identical to part of the charm of Indiana Jones, and this is pretty much universally true of any charms of the Uncharted games - is that Nathan is a weathered adult who has been doing this for a while, and has built up the knowledge base and the street smarts to be a crafty, quick-thinking adventurer, along with the fatigue to be a cynical asshole about it. We can maybe say that the movie is meant to be an origin story, but that's pretty much the only option. Even allowing that the realities of the film marketplace dictate that we need a 25-year-old Nathan Drake, Tom Holland is a freakishly young-looking 25. Cynicism is profoundly unconvincing coming out of his mouth, and hard-won world-weary wisdom just feels like elfin puckishness. Not that you can't make a good Indiana Jones knock-off with Holland in the lead; but I think you cannot, in fact, make a good Uncharted movie with him.
So that's where we starting from: Uncharted isn't really "Uncharted", and the sooner you agree that you're just there to watch a generic treasure hunting adventure, the happier you'll be. This then leads to the much, much bigger problem than Holland's baby face: this isn't, in fact, a good Indiana Jones knock-off. It's quite a lifeless film altogether, in fact, one that can't even have fun with its globe-trotting premise. Which, for the record, shuttles Nathan and Sully from New York to Barcelona to the Philippines, racing the vicious and greedy Santiago Moncada (Antonio Banderas), last scion of the wealthy family that funded Magellan's voyage, and his nefarious henchwoman Jo Braddock (Tati Gabrielle), who has some manner of undisclosed but violent past with Sully. In the middle we find Chloe Frazer (Sophia Ali), who also has an undisclosed past with Sully that doesn't seem violent, but doesn't really seem friendly; she's also a treasure hunter, and Nathan is instantly smitten with her, and she's not remotely above using this fact to manipulate him.
So anyway, that's a surprisingly small list of places, but it offers up enough variety, especially since the film's layover in Barcelona pulls out quite a few playful locations, including ancient Roman tunnels that have, much to the characters' confusion, been turned into a hip dance club and/or a Papa John's. And as it so happens, Papa John's does in fact operate in Spain, and apparently does quite a business there, though this does not in the slightest distract from how nakedly this entire sequence is a protracted bit of product placement, and the attempts at making some kind of joke about it just makes the whole thing much, much more irritating. But anyways, the Barcelona chunk of the movie is absolutely where Uncharted comes the closest to being its best self: an adventure through fancifully designed sets that house death traps and puzzles. And even here, the film is a little bit soft and disappointing; the puzzles are extremely straightforward, generally require that Nathan be able to read something and immediately determine the second-most straightforward way to interpret it. So in addition to not being Indiana Jones, we're not even able to rise up to National Treasure.
Still, it's only merely insubstantial as an archaeological treasure hunt. Where it really, really falls apart is as an action spectacle. This is already something it's not trying to be very hard: there are surprisingly few action setpieces for an overt Indiana Jones knock-off, given that Raiders of the Lost Ark is at least partially responsible for the very concept of "action setpieces" as something that exist to give structure to action movies. And the ones we get are all bad. Not even in a bright and exciting way, where they're messy and noisy and incoherent; they're just boring. I'm sure the pandemic was at least partially responsible, but Uncharted feels very much like the kind of movie that was mostly completed in pre-visualization, with all of the big action scenes involving crazy moving virtual cameras and lots of CGI moving parts and big scope but never a sense of big scale. Holland and his stunt doubles are so clearly detached from the action around them that it never even feels exciting; I can't even say "it feels like a video game", because that's a comparison that Uncharted very specifically fails to live up to. The Uncharted games have dazzling, physically unlikely stunts and chaos; the movie can't even make a free-fall sequence feel terribly exciting, since it makes such bland choices about where to put the camera and how unpleasantly loud to mix the sound effects track.
The one chance this might have had to redeem itself would be on the backs of its characters. And it comes, honestly, kind of close. Holland and Wahlberg are both painfully miscast in the roles they've been given (Wahlberg as Nathan, right here in 2022, wouldn't be a terrible choice, but that's not what we've been given), but they're not terrible within the limits of the writing and that miscasting. I tire of seeing Holland try very hard to play grown-up; he's too fragile-looking to support the amount of muscle he's built up, and his features too soft and round to make it feel authentic when he cusses and leers sexually. But quipping in front of CGI is much closer to his comfort zone than the godawful Cherry, and he carries it off tolerably well. Neither he nor Wahlberg is helped by how perfunctory much of the film's writing is - the characters slide in and out of being exposition boxes several times over the course of the film - but they both conceptually understand where the sarcastic beats in the script are, and they both hit them.
This does not, unfortunately, allow them to rise up to the level of "bantering". Indeed, I don't think that Holland and Wahlberg are playing off of each other much at all: the plot situates them as an antagonist odd couple who nevertheless keep falling into rhythm with each other, and this just doesn't... happen. Perhaps it's because the quipping is so generic and pro forma (this film is unusually bad at giving its characters distinct personalities or distinguishable speech patterns, and a shocking number of the "jokes" are basically just people saying something unexceptional in an arch tone of voice) that it didn't encourage them to treat it as a fencing match, but just something to get through. Whatever the case, it doesn't feel like two people bouncing off of each other, but two actors delivering well-rehearsed lines. And that completely robs Uncharted of any of the bright, fresh feeling that's at the heart of any good popcorn movie.
