After over a decade in development, Uncharted arrives looking like a movie that could have been made without fuss in the early 2010s. Ruben Fleischer’s directorial effort is a simple, almost stripped-down adaptation of the popular Naughty Dog action video game, so by the book that I cannot fathom why it took this long to get made. It features plot points, character threads and set pieces straight out of the first four games in the series but makes the colossal mistake of turning this first movie into a prequel origin story. Tom Holland pitched a “James Bond origin story” and instead we ended up with “young Nathan Drake,” but the result is the same. Yes, this is a film where we spend the entire runtime watching our untested and inexperienced pickpocket grow into Nathan Drake: Bad-Ass Treasure Hunter.
Opening mid-action with a preview of the film’s centerpiece special effects sequence, we then need a gratuitous prologue showing a pre-teen Nathan parting ways with his older brother after both are caught trying to steal a treasure map. Considering the film fades to black at around 105 minutes and this prologue brings us up to the eight-minute mark, there’s only around 97 minutes of actual *movie*. Much of what follows feels rushed or threadbare, but Holland gets a few charming introductory moments as a bartender who occasionally picks the pockets of his customers. I’m not sure how that works in terms of consistent employment since you’d think someone would notice the pattern, but I digress. Holland has clearly attended the Cocktail school of bartending, even if he still looks young enough that it’s weird watching him knock back alcohol.
Yes, Holland is a 25-year-old actor playing a 25-year-old man, but he still looks barely out of middle school and often comes off as a kid cosplaying a world-weary action hero. He spends plenty of time shirtless and buff, but the (unquestionably handsome) young man comes off as a New Hope-era Luke Skywalker trying to convince us that he’s Han Solo. Mark Wahlberg was originally set to play Nathan a decade ago. The chatty, overeager performance he gives here feels almost like a spoof on crusty duplicitous mentors. Holland as Nathan Drake comes off as watching your little brother who is still too young to drink, kill or screw save the day. Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t really start trying to play adults until several years after Titanic. Being compared to a young DiCaprio isn't exactly an insult.
Either by design or via Covid-era production challenges, the film feels smaller and emptier than you might think considering the $120 million budget. The film’s climax, an engrossing mid-air battle with a mix of swashbuckling and vehicle action, feels oddly lacking in opponents and scale. Not helping is how skittish the film is about onscreen bloodshed. While the picture does do the work in justifying why Nathan and Sully are less “bad guys” than Moncada (an underused Antonio Banderas, although he came down with Covid mid-production) and Braddock (Tati Gabrielle), the action is less James Bond and more James Bond Jr., with our callow young adventurer barely holding a gun until the film’s final reel. Sophia Ali's Chloe Frazer gets a body count as a side-switching associate of Sully’s, but she’s unfortunately only there as G-rated eye candy.
As for what works, the film looks, as lensed by Chung-hoon Chung, appropriately lush and colorful. Most of the action sequences are shot and edited with at least some consideration of geography and clarity, although the finale needs to breathe a little. The chemistry between Holland and Wahlberg does click in their earlier moments, even if too much of what follows is action-movie yelling. The mid-film set piece, gently riffing on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’s underground tomb raiding, allows for a relaxed and character-focused exploratory adventure. Banderas only gets one scene of mustache-twirling menace, but Gabrielle gets a mean figure as the “doer of violence.” Alas, it seems like the film is aware of the optics of two white guys racing “not a white guy” anti-heroes to sunken treasure and tiptoes around any gruff interactions.
Uncharted is a sexless, bloodless adventure movie that, by adapting source material that was inspired by Indiana Jones, Tomb Raider, National Treasure and the James Bond movies, comes off as a copy of a copy. It’s more coherent and more visually consistent than Jungle Cruise, and I appreciate that no one in is magically revealed as “the special.” Alas, it’s a mediocre action-adventure movie, sans much in the way of memorable characters or clever plotting, at a time when audiences can rent, buy or stream the genuine articles at a click of a button. a set-up for a sequel that may well never happen. In a time when video game movies have given us genuine winners like Detective Pikachu, Sonic the Hedgehog and Rampage, just being “not that bad for a video movie” is no longer “good enough.”
