Uncharted (Movie) | Review

Introducing: Uncharted Movie Review

I never really have high hopes for video game movies. I think most people who love the medium as much as I do would agree that’s for good reason. Video game movies that are also good are notoriously rare occurrences. Often when we get ones that are good, they’re actually movies about video games, such as Wreck it Ralph or Free Guy, rather than movie adaptations of a previously video game story. There’s just something that is fundamentally hard to adapt about video games. I’m no expert, so I couldn’t tell you if it’s removing the interactivity or the way that lore gets delivered differently between the two. Maybe it’s the fact that you’re turning dozen hour experiences into ones that last only two hours at the most. No matter what exactly it is, they tend not to go well.

As a result of all of this, I didn’t exactly have high hopes for the Uncharted movie. It’s a game series that I like well enough, but the majority of the series were just kind of dumb action stories and not anything that had a super deep story. I like the characters, sure, and I like an adventure, but it’s not as though these stories were tightly woven epics for most of their existence. It was a series that thrived on the gameplay it delivered. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who didn’t have high hopes, because when I booked my ticket online Wednesday night, not a single other one had been bought. (Though, when I actually saw the movie there were like 12 people there.) But, I like a bit of dumb action now and again, so off to the movie theater I went.

The Bottom Line

If you’re just looking for the bottom line about if the movie is good or not, it’s… fine. I’ve had a few people ask me what I thought about it and that’s how I have to respond, a brief pause before saying that it’s fine. If you go in just looking for a cheap popcorn flick that you can kind of turn your brain off to, you’re going to like it plenty fine. Heck, if you have a friend who you are trying to get into Uncharted who is really into Tom Holland, then this would be the perfect way to potentially open the door for them. 

However, people who have made the games their life and swear by them likely aren’t going to like it as much. There are a lot of changes that can get under your skin if you let them. It comes down to that this is just a different universe than the games. While there are similar characters, there’s just enough that’s different that they don’t always feel quite the same. For being a story of their own, that’s fine. However, if you were going in expecting that this was a prequel film like many seem to believe it is, you are going to be caught off guard by just how much was changed.

Moving Fast

One thing I can appreciate is that, in some ways, they have kept the structure of an Uncharted game in the jump to the silver screen. The film opens in medias res like all of the games do. In this case, it even opens with a big homage to the famous cargo plane sequence from Uncharted 3. It’s a series of big set pieces that are strung together with connective tissue in the same way that the games are, just with all the shooting gallery bits removed. In fact, I think Nathan only shoots one gunshot in the entire movie. We then move into a flashback before going into the main story, much like the games have done.

The action is perhaps the best part of the movie. The action scenes are a lot of fun in their own right most of the time, with the fights having a decent energy to them even in their slower moments. The problem is that I just know that they can be a little better. This is directed by Ruben Fleischer, the same man who gave us both of the Zombieland films. Those had a lot higher energy throughout, and this seems to lack some of the creativity that I know he’s capable of. I don’t know if it was his choice to play it safe or if it was a mandate from Sony to do so, but either way, I ended up coming away feeling like everything was fine, but it’s not something that I am going to remember in the long term. However, the big final set piece that involved a pair of helicopters and a pair of sailing ships at the same time does feel like it could be something right out of another Uncharted game.

The film also plays a little fast and loose with when it wants physics to be a factor in the action. Most of the time it tends to error close to reality, give or take the characters being a little more durable than the average person in order to make everything happen. I can forgive that in my action movies since it’s part and parcel with the genre. However, when a string of cargo boxes are hanging from the back of a plane in flight, Nathan should not be able to stand up on top of one and jump to another that is closer to the plane. Sorry, that just took me out of things in the first five minutes, that he was going from clinging on for his life to jumping from one to another like they’re just sitting on a soundstage.

The Character Assassinations

Now let’s get into the thing that really bothered me. They took Victor Sullivan out back, shot him in the head, and replaced him with Mark Wahlberg. Never was I convinced that Wahlberg was playing a character, it just felt like he was being himself the whole time, which took away from things a lot. In the moments where he is meant to be sincere, he came off as the opposite and while he and Holland had decent chemistry, it just never fully clicked. I mean, we literally have that moment near the end of the film where he has to choose between grabbing the bag full of treasure and grabbing Nathan’s hand. It’s sad, because it’s such a cliché thing to do. Not that Uncharted has never made use of clichés before, but this is one that wasn’t used with Sully and had no reason to be used here.

Chloe is also around for a good portion of the film, but it never really felt like Chloe. I never had a real problem with what they were doing here, but it just felt like they had made up a completely different character and slapped her name on it at times. In the games, Chloe was a character that would be brought in because she had a very specific skillset, which was cool. She was the driver and one of the best in the business. In this film, she’s there because she was able to get to a treasure before the boys, that’s it. Her character has also been reduced to just “I was betrayed, so now I constantly betray everyone else”. I understand when we move to a movie, that some things are going to get simplified, but with how much screen time she has, I feel she could have been given a little more depth besides that and snarky.

The whole time, though, it was nearly painfully obvious that Elena was missing. There was a lot of appeal to Elena in the games. She was one of the characters that was willing to tell Nate that he was being dumb instead of encouraging some of his worst behaviors like Sully could have a tendency to do. She kept Nate grounded. But most of all, she was a character that wasn’t there for the money and had no stake in finding a treasure so she was a rock that you knew wasn’t going to betray Nate. In this movie, where all the characters are looking to drop each other at a moment’s notice, having one character that we could always be sure was on Nate’s side was something that we very much needed.

See if You’re Curious, It’s Really Not that Bad

However, for all the complaints that I have, it’s not like the movie was painful to sit through. I was entertained throughout and Holland did make for a good Nathan Drake, if a green and too trusting one. The adventure itself is a lot of fun and the places that were chosen to be the backdrop to a globe spanning adventure were beautiful. It’s just a movie that you have to go into not expecting it to be anything groundbreaking is all.

If you’re curious and have a gift card for the movies, just need to get out, or can go at any discount, I think this is one that’s worth giving a shot. If it gets to streaming services anytime soon, that might be a good time to watch it as well! I mean, it seems like we’re going to see more of these. They couldn’t even wait until the middle of the credits to give us a sequel tease this time around.