Uncharted Review: Tom Holland’s Nathan Drake Double-Crosses Fans of the Games

The games are fixated on the idea of honor among thieves, but you wouldn’t know that from this antic, meaningless film.

Uncharted
Photo: Columbia Pictures

Like many of Naughty Dog’s other video game properties, Uncharted wears its cinematic influences on its sleeves. Modeled after the Indiana Jones films, the exploits of treasure hunter Nathan Drake have been so clearly designed to feel like playable movies that they render the long-gestating film adaptation, directed by Ruben Fleischer, at best redundant and at worst a step down from its source material. With interactivity removed from the equation, this Uncharted essentially plays out like a series of cutscenes.

One of the more distinctive aspects of the games is that Nathan is middle-aged, and as such has carried with him the experience of a lifetime of his grueling adventures. The film, though, doesn’t reach for the elegiac, as it serves as an origin story, and a distinctly Hollywoodized one at that. Here we come to know Nathan (Tom Holland) as a young adult being introduced to treasure hunting by a seasoned pro, Victor “Sully” Sullivan (Mark Wahlberg), who’s also been de-aged for this film and as such sapped of some of the gravitas that comes with life.

Holland’s Nathan feels like any other franchise protagonist of the modern moment, and if anything this Uncharted frames his knowledge of history as preternatural rather than something that was carefully gained over a long period of time and through reasoned inquiry. He also lacks the comfort level with Sully that defined their rapport in the video games, with the film replacing the banter that teems with shared, unspoken history with the sort of dreary, quip-heavy humor that has become a standard of blockbuster screenwriting.

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Sully recruits Nathan to help him find a treasure that was hidden by members of Magellan’s 16th-century expedition around the world, and those familiar with Uncharted will recognize the broad outlines of the plot and how it progresses: The pair, along with fellow treasure seeker Chloe Frazer (Sophia Ali), traverse the world combing through ancient landmarks and hidden chambers, looking for clues that will lead them to a treasure trove of gold.

In sharp contrast to the games, which wouldn’t be the same without the consideration they put into parsing notes and solving puzzles, the film doesn’t paint a charming, or patient, picture of the art of sleuthing. Nathan uses his power of deductive reasoning to figure out each mystery almost as quickly as it arises. Similarly, the action moves swiftly through its locales. Only Barcelona, where the characters must traverse church catacombs that snake through the city’s underbelly, feels like it plays an actual role in the story, but even here the action is so rushed that you feel no sense of wonder for history and all the secrets that it contains.

The film devotes most of its time to its characters in peril, as well as to a dizzying number of double-crosses among them. But the action is resolutely unintelligible, often playing out as a mishmash of close-ups of limbs and weapons. More weird, though, than this unintentionally vertiginous sense of movement is the intended showstoppers and their conspicuous lack of grandiosity, especially one set piece, a mid-air frenzy of flying cargo and falling bodies, that blatantly lifts one of the games’ definitive moments, only without the escalating absurdity.

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The games are fixated on the idea of honor among thieves, but you wouldn’t know that from the antic, meaningless depiction of the betrayals that play out across the film. What was once a carefully paced series of blindsides becomes a flurry of reversals not only between the main players but also their rivals, in this case Santiago Moncada (Antonio Banderas), the descendant of a Medici-esque family whose blood-soaked history has ties to the Magellan expedition, and his henchwoman, Jo (Tati Gabrielle), who also shares a past with Sully.

With everyone constantly turning on one another, no room is made for real characterization. Even Nathan, the star of the show, is exactly the same person at the end as he is when he’s first introduced. In many respects, Uncharted feels less cinematic than its source material, lacking the games’ interest in their lore and environments or watching characters grow by confronting their assumptions and biases. In the end, there’s no meaningful distinction here between the greed of the ostensible heroes and that of the villains, which could have made for cutting critique were the film itself not so beguiled by the intoxicating allure of ill-gotten treasure.

Score: 
 Cast: Tom Holland, Mark Wahlberg, Antonio Banderas, Sophia Ali, Tati Gabrielle, Rudy Pankow  Director: Ruben Fleischer  Screenwriter: Rafe Lee Judkins, Art Marcum, Matt Holloway  Distributor: Columbia Pictures  Running Time: 116 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2022  Buy: Video

Jake Cole

Jake Cole is an Atlanta-based film critic whose work has appeared in MTV News and Little White Lies. He is a member of the Atlanta Film Critics Circle and the Online Film Critics Society.

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