by Austen Terry, Contributing Writer
I am not someone who has played every Uncharted video game. I started the remastered version for the PS4 and never really got into it. For me and for the purposes of this review, I will solely focus on this being a movie and not what I don’t know about the video game franchise. I went into the movie as someone who likes treasure hunting movies and as someone who is a fan of Tom Holland. If you go into this movie thinking of it as a standalone movie, then you will probably have a good time. There are plenty of things that work and plenty that don’t, but there were some good action sequences and some good humor along the way.
Uncharted tells the story of young Nathan “Nate” Drake (Holland) before the times of the video games. Nate meets Victor “Sully” Sullivan (Mark Wahlberg), who asks questions about a treasure Nate’s brother Sam was obsessed with. Nate and Sully, along with Chloe Frazier (Sophia Ali), are looking to find the lost treasure of Ferdinand Magellan that has been lost for 500 years. With all great treasure hunting movies, you have to have a villain and some henchmen looking for the treasure too, and along for the ride are Santiago Moncada (Antonio Banderas), who believes the treasure is his birthright, Braddock (Tati Gabrielle), and The Scotsman (Steven Waddington) to help Moncada steal the treasure. With five billion dollars worth of gold on the line, there will always be people trying to get the treasure, and it will leave you wondering who can you trust.
Now I don’t want to give too much of the plot away, but there is a lot to unpack here about what works and doesn’t work. On a positive note, there seems to be a lot of chemistry between Holland and Wahlberg, who work well together and play off each other really well. But I could never feel if I could trust Sully, and the way Wahlberg played him, you know he is hiding something and cannot be trusted. There’s even an intense moment between Holland and Banderas that shows how well they can play off each other. It felt to methat Nate was on easy mode — there were many scenes where he couldn’t hold his own against the baddies he was fighting. It just seems Nate is there because he knows the history, is smart, and can work out what all the clues are saying and meaning.
One of the biggest problems for me was the setting of this supposed prequel movie in modern-day times with modern-day technologies. The characters rely too heavily on technology — they use earpieces, smartphones, and satellite mapping throughout the movie, whereas other movies like this never had to. What has always made treasure hunting movies like Indiana Jones, National Treasure, The Goonies, The Da Vinci Code, or Sahara great was that they were able to interpret the clues left behind and didn’t need all this modern-day stuff to help them. Nate does work out what each clue means and can figure things out like the treasure hunters of old, but the characters are always relying on technology.
Another positive note that I can point out is that in the action sequences, there are some pulled directly from the games (my friends tell me this), and the way they shot them here it feels like you are playing a game. I am currently playing a game that has been said is like the Uncharted series, and when we see the airplane scene that’s in all the trailers so no real spoilers here: when Nate is trying to grab onto things, in my head, I was hitting my A button to jump and the LT to grab onto things. There were a couple of scenes like this that make the movie an enjoyable watch.
One of the other things that kind of worked and would have made the movie better if the characters quipped about it was being in a modern city trying to find the clues to solve the puzzle. Many times with treasure hunting movies, they have the inevitable big puzzle that the protagonist must solve to gain some artifact that will help find the treasure, but they are doing so hundreds of years after these clues were left for someone to find. They play with that trope a little, but with all the other humor in this movie, they could have exchanged banter about cities changing in 500 years. There is one specific puzzle part that boggles my mind that no one in 500 years found this very easy-to-find thing in a building people are at every day. In the end, it’s stuff like this that makes you start to question things.
All in all, I think the actors were giving their all and having fun while doing it. Holland delivered a great performance and any praise he gets from this movie is well deserved. I enjoyed the movie, and felt like even with the PG-13 rating, it was a movie for anyone; there were families at the showing I went to. I just recommend going into this movie as a treasure hunting movie with Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg. Don’t go into it expecting the games. It’s a good start movie, and I hope it builds into a trilogy or a franchise.
Grade: C+
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