Uncharted (2022) Review

A bartender in New York who picks pockets is recruited by a treasure hunter to find gold hidden by Magellan’s expedition five hundred years ago. There is a map, there are two keys, there is a rival with money.

The 3 is for competent emptiness. Nothing in it is offensive, the locations are pleasant, the action is adequately staged, and there is not a single moment anybody will remember a week later.

What makes it worth writing about is the adaptation problem. The games were built from Indiana Jones, National Treasure and every other treasure hunt film, and a film adapted from them arrives with nothing of its own.

The Photocopy Problem

The Uncharted games are excellent and they are excellent as games. They take a familiar adventure register, which they borrowed openly, and make it interactive.

What they added was participation. The set pieces work because the player is executing them, the exploration works because the player is doing it, and the character is likeable partly because the player has been him for thirty hours.

Remove the controller and what remains is the borrowed material. A wisecracking treasure hunter, a mentor figure of uncertain loyalty, a capable woman who may betray him, an artifact, a puzzle, a villain with a helicopter.

That is the specific failure here. The film adapts the surface of something whose value was in the experience, and the surface was never the original part.

The games also knew what they were doing. They are openly affectionate toward the films they draw on, the references are jokes between the developers and the player, and a film version turns those jokes back into the thing they were joking about.

The Cargo Plane

The best sequence is a fight among crates falling out of the back of an aircraft, and it is a direct reproduction of a famous sequence from the third game.

It works for the reason the original worked. The rules are clear, the geography is legible, the danger is physical, and every beat follows from the previous one. A man on a falling car, a car on a falling pallet, a pallet leaving an aircraft.

Holland is also good in it. The physical comedy is genuine, the panic reads, and for about eight minutes the film has a person in it instead of a collection of attitudes.

The reason the panic reads is that he is bad at it. Drake is not calmly executing a plan, he is holding on to a net while objects the size of cars leave an aircraft around him, and incompetence under pressure is more watchable than skill.

What it also demonstrates is the problem. The most memorable thing in the film is a shot-for-shot reproduction of something that already existed, which means the adaptation’s high point is its least original moment.

Holland and Wahlberg

Tom Holland is a capable actor playing a character defined by a quality he does not have, which is worldliness. Nathan Drake in the games is a man in his thirties with a history, a great many miles behind him and a weariness underneath the jokes. Holland is playing him at twenty-five with none of that.

Mark Wahlberg is Sully and the casting is stranger. The character is an older mentor, a father figure, morally compromised, and Wahlberg plays him as a peer with a moustache arriving in the last ten minutes.

The relationship between them is the emotional structure of the games and it does not exist here. They meet, they distrust each other, they distrust each other again, and the film has no time to build what it is drawing on.

Sophia Ali and Tati Gabrielle are both better than the material. Chloe is written as a series of betrayals with no position underneath them, and Braddock is a mercenary with a helicopter and no reason to be in the film beyond needing a second antagonist.

Chloe in particular betrays somebody roughly four times, and the film treats each one as a reveal. A character who cannot be trusted from the first scene produces no surprise on the fourth occasion, only a note that the plot required a complication.

Nothing Is Established

The film assumes the audience will supply the affection the games earned, and it does almost no work of its own.

Nathan’s brother disappeared when he was a child and the film opens on it, which is a promising start and is then handled entirely through flashback in the first four minutes and a postcard. By the time the brother question resolves, the audience has no relationship with him beyond the information that he exists.

The treasure is the same problem. Five hundred years of history, a Magellan expedition, gold worth five billion dollars, and none of it is given a single detail that makes it specific. Compare what Raiders does with an object. The Ark is dangerous, it has rules, and people are frightened of it.

What the film has instead is a map with two keys, a puzzle with two halves, and a cave with a mechanism, which are shapes instead of things.

Antonio Banderas plays the wealthy rival and is given the same treatment. He wants the gold because his family has a claim to it, he says so once, and nothing about him is developed past a motive stated in a sentence.

Fifteen Years of Development

The film was in development from around 2008, went through at least six directors and multiple leads, and arrived fourteen years later with Ruben Fleischer directing.

That history is legible in the result. A project passed between that many hands accumulates compromises, loses whoever originally wanted it, and eventually gets made because the rights need using instead of because anybody had a vision.

David O. Russell, Neil Burger, Seth Gordon, Shawn Levy, Dan Trachtenberg and Travis Knight were all attached at various points, and Mark Wahlberg was at one stage going to play Drake instead of Sully, which is the kind of production detail that explains a great deal about how the finished casting ended up where it did.

It also took around four hundred million dollars worldwide, which is why a sequel was commissioned immediately. The commercial logic and the creative result are entirely unrelated, as with most things on this page.

It is also one of the higher-grossing video game adaptations, which is a category that spent thirty years failing and has recently started working. The ones that work adapt a world and the ones that do not adapt a plot.

What is clear is that Holland is the reason. A young actor with a large audience carried a property nobody was asking for to a substantial return, and the studio learned that the casting mattered and the film did not.

Should you watch Uncharted?

Only the cargo plane, and you could watch the original sequence from the game instead. A photocopy of a photocopy, with a twenty-five-year-old playing a man defined by experience, a mentor who arrives too late to be one, and a treasure with no properties.

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