Hollywood’s success rate at filming video games is so bad it’s become a meme. Even today when a few, like Detective Pikachu, rise to the level of mediocrity it’s almost an instant joke when yet another famous gaming franchise is announced to be getting a movie, and after fourteen years of development Uncharted does little to change that.
The promise of the Uncharted game when it first came out was that it was like a Hollywood blockbuster you could play, which was novel in 2008 when giant, scripted, in-engine events were still in their infancy. The plot, a generic rehash of a million Indy ripoffs, didn’t matter much beyond its ability to thread together huge action scene after huge action scene. Logically the way to adapt this to film, if you really have to, would be to try and recreate the feeling the game was going for.
The newer Mission: Impossible movies arguably already do that, being little more than a series of spectacular stunt pieces held together by the thinnest of plots.
But Uncharted the film doesn’t do that. It tries, far harder than it should, to get us invested in these characters — their hopes and fears and tragic backstories — and devotes so much time to crossing and double-crossing that you quickly give up following the plot at all and just let it slide past your brain. Nate’s childhood, a scene partly stolen from the fourth game, sets up a whole thread about his missing and possibly deceased brother which feels like it doesn’t matter at all by the end, and multiple post-credit scenes try to keep it tugging on our heartstrings after many viewers will have forgotten its existence.
As with the games the script is written in a faux-Joss Whedon style, all quips and snark no matter if it makes sense for the scene. While occasionally the dialogue gets some genuine laughs most of it feels obligatory, giving the story a rather hollow feel of a tonal checklist being ticked off every time someone shoot back a new wisecrack.
The cast feel almost without exception strangely miscast. Mark Wahlberg as any sort of mentor figure is bizarre, Tom Holland feels too young even in a role that constantly plays on his youth, and Tati Gabrielle makes the least intimidating hitwoman I’ve seen in a while.
Sophia Ali is the only major player who doesn’t feel wrong for her role, but that’s more because her role is largely just The Girl. There’s also a Scottish heavy (actually called “Scotty”) with what must be the worst accent I’ve heard in years.
Action-wise the film rarely stands out either. While the heavily greenscreened opening feels weightless the movie has more practical action than I expected going in, even if it’s always hampered by being from the director of Gangster Squad. The climax however, an enormous fight involving pirate ships, is actually quite entertaining, inventive and reasonably dramatic, and left me leaving the cinema with something of a smile on my face.
Uncharted, like many game franchises that get adapted into films, looks much more of a sure thing than it is. The games ape movies to a huge extent, their marketing endlessly trumpeting how “cinematic” they are as their greatest virtue. But the aspects they copy from films are the ones films themselves long ago tired of. There’s a reason we don’t see many modern Indiana Jones ripoffs these days outside of video game adaptations like Uncharted and Tomb Raider.
In the end there’s just something that feels off about setting, or even making, this kind of movie in the twenty-first century.
Indiana Jones and the Rachel Weisz Mummy films smartly kept their stories to the 1930s, the time when globetrotting grave robbing was still respectable, but the latter were likely made at the last time it was possible to do so. They are stories from a time when the world felt like it still had places to explore, when every nook and cranny wasn’t visible in a second on Google Maps. They don’t make sense in a world which now feels so small.
