Uncharted (2022) Review
3/10
A treasure hunter recruits a bartender in New York who picks pockets to find gold that Magellan’s expedition hid five hundred years ago. There’s a map, there are two keys, there’s 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’s not a single moment anybody will remember a week later.
Uncharted stings in a way louder failures don’t. A mess at least takes a swing. This one has Tom Holland, a Magellan treasure and a budget big enough to buy anything, and it spends all of it reproducing things other films did better. I’d have taken a glorious wreck over this polite blank.
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’re excellent as games. They take a familiar adventure tone, 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’s the failure here. The film adapts the surface of something whose value was in the experience, and the surface was never the original part.
I think the project was doomed before a frame was shot. Somebody looked at a game whose best quality is putting you in the driver’s seat and decided the plot was the part worth buying.
The games also knew what they were doing. They’re 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.
Adapting between forms means identifying what the original form supplied and finding your own equivalent. If the answer is participation and your medium doesn’t have it, you need something else entirely. Reproducing the plot is the least useful thing you can carry across.
Ask what your source did that your form can’t do. That question has one honest answer and it’s always the most important thing about the project. A work assembled from borrowed elements can be excellent if it adds something. When the addition was the interactivity, a passive version has nothing left.
The Cargo Plane
The best sequence is a fight among crates falling out of the back of an aircraft, and it’s 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 lands, the panic reads, and for about eight minutes the film has a person in it instead of a collection of attitudes. I enjoyed that stretch more than anything else in the film, and it’s the only time I cared whether anybody made it out alive.
The reason the panic reads is that he’s bad at it. Drake isn’t calmly executing a plan, he’s 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 shows is the problem. The most memorable thing in the film is a shot-for-shot reproduction of something that already existed. That 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 worldliness, a quality he doesn’t have. 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.
Wahlberg is the casting that baffles me. Sully should feel like a man who’s pulled Drake out of a hundred bad spots, and Wahlberg plays him like a guy Drake met at the gym last week.
The relationship between them is the emotional structure of the games and it doesn’t exist here. They meet, they distrust each other, they distrust each other again, and the film has no time to build what it’s 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 can’t be trusted from the first scene produces no surprise on the fourth occasion, only a note that the plot required a complication.
Casting against a character’s defining quality requires you to change the character. If your protagonist’s central trait is experience and your actor is twenty-five, write a younger man instead of a young man pretending. The film wants both and gets neither.
A mentor relationship needs the story to establish the mentor before the protagonist meets him. Here the film introduces both at once and asks the audience to feel a history it hasn’t shown. When two characters are meant to carry the emotional weight, give them a scene with no plot in it. This film never does.
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. That’s 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 gets 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. I cared about that box. I couldn’t have cared less about this gold.
What the film has instead is a map with two keys, a puzzle with two halves, and a cave with a mechanism. They’re 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 points, and Mark Wahlberg was at one stage going to play Drake instead of Sully. It’s 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. That’s why a sequel was commissioned immediately. The commercial logic and the creative result are entirely unrelated, as with most things on this page.
It’s also one of the higher-grossing video game adaptations. That’s a category that spent thirty years failing and has recently started working. The ones that work adapt a world and the ones that don’t adapt a plot. What’s clear is that Holland is the reason. A young actor with a large audience carried a property nobody was asking for to a serious return, and the studio learned that the casting mattered and the film didn’t.
A project that passes through many hands loses whatever made somebody want it. The first version of an idea has a reason and the twelfth version has a schedule. If you’re revising something for the fifth time and can’t remember why you started, that’s the same problem at a smaller scale.
Long development isn’t the same as careful development. One is a project being improved and the other is a project being survived.
When a work succeeds on casting instead of content, the lesson the market takes is about casting, and the next one will have the same hole in it.
Should you watch Uncharted?
Only the cargo plane, and you could watch the original sequence from the game instead. I’m giving it a 3 because nothing in it is incompetent, and I’m stopping at 3 because nothing in it is anyone’s own idea. It’s 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.
