Uncharted - Cheap Thoughts

It’s hard to be excited for a feature when the disingenuous nature of its existence is presented right in its male lead. Nathan Drake is not the most complicated character in videogame history, really any white man with an obnoxious yet charming charisma could play him, and throw a stone in any direction in Hollywood and you’ll hit an actor with that exact persona. Thus the casting of Tom Holland shows right from the beginning this was never about faithful adaptation, but name recognition. The celebrity draw might be a smaller pool than it once was, but Holland is definitely a name that draws younger audiences, and he’s certainly provides plenty of entertainment to the screen, he is more the awkward funny man who thankfully is able to perform his own stunts than he is a Nathan Drake fit. Not to mention he has permanent baby face forcing this to be an origin story meaning the rest of the cast has to be infantilize along with it. Mark Wahlberg as Sully only solidifies this as name brand casting rather than accuracy, and just slap the Uncharted name on for brand recognition.

Uncharted as a videogame franchise was always more heavily targeted towards entertaining characters and big spectacle action scenes. What made it work was the talents of Amy Hennig’s direction and the wonderful chemistry of the cast as characters with established relationships who know each other well. So having that all undone with an entirely new cast all of whom don’t know each other so there are no established bonds and thus a lot of hesitancy and betrayal amongst the ensemble and there is so much back and forth of characters working together, betraying each other, working together again, all switching between them like a light. Trust is the theme of the day with this film, with its protagonist Nathan Drake (Tom Holland) being the only one willing to trust everyone as he’s new to the treasure hunting business while everyone else betrays one another with every other blink and hopefully along the way they’ll learn to trust except they don’t. These alliances change so rapidly with no clear momentum being built on who is friends with who that in the end people trust or don’t trust one another simply because the script says so, with no clear reason for the characters because no relationship is consistent enough to build a rapport.

As for the bombastic action scenes, likewise it is something that is lost but that is more due to changing of mediums. People have often said that Uncharted would work well as a film but truly that is only because structurally there is nothing too solidified in videogames as the only medium these stories could be told, however the spectacle is where it specialised. It’s one thing to watch Tom Holland on a green screen pretending to be thrown from a plane, it’s another thing entirely for you the audience to be the one thrown from a plane as you’re the controller of the narrative. That type of immediate empathy created so rapidly that only videogames can is what made Uncharted a success. You weren’t watching these great adventures, you were the one experiencing it.

Not to say films can’t have that kind of spectacle, they very much can, and this film had that opportunity, but sadly it was squandered. If Venom proved anything it’s that Ruben Fleischer is a mediocre director at best, but absolutely not someone who can properly handle a blockbuster size film. Considering the climax of the film has an absolutely absurd yet entertaining setting for an action scene, with the wonderfully talented Chung-hoon Chung as Director of Photography and a lead actor who famously does his own stunts and yet it is such a dull, lifeless and poorly sequenced action scene, as most of them are.

There is no spectacle to be found in this adventure film, no charisma to the found in its cast, no purpose in adapting this property. It is a soulless cash-grab so elegantly designed to grab as much of said cash as possible, if only it put that much effort into making a good film.

-Danny