Video game movies get a pretty bum rap. Beyond Silent Hill, you’re not going to find any true-blue stans with academic bona fides of any property that’s made its way from console or PC to the big screen since the PS2 era, but there have been a few decent ones over the half-decade. Rampage was an alright echo of the monster-mash goofiness of the ’80s Godzilla films, and Detective Pikachu was both wonderfully designed as an aesthetic exercise and an exceptionally strange bit of branding that made its way to the screen unmolested by fan complaints (see the uproar over Sonic’s original design for more). But both of those films tried, at least, to offer some sort of cinematic distance from their video game counterparts — sure, Rampage has had a few modern-style updates, and Detective Pikachu was based on a specific game, but if you’re thinking of Rampage and Pokemon, you’re typically thinking of low-fi graphics at either the arcade or on your Game Boy. The real issues come into play when you don’t have any feature that separates the film from the game beyond the presence of famous people in familiar roles. It’s why the Mortal Kombat films had to get exceptionally weird and accurately represent the game’s bizarre lore in order to be compelling because if you’re just going to watch a bunch of shitty fights, you might as well be the one controlling the guy ripping the skull and spine out of Scorpion. This is why making an Uncharted movie was always a decently bad idea, especially when, after a full decade spent in development hell, it made its way down to Ruben Fleischer, he of Zombieland and Venom fame. It’s a fallacy to assume that because something looks cinematic that it will be just as appealing on the big screen, and Fleischer falls face-first into this trap.
Uncharted, in Fleischer’s hands, could be more accurately titled The Young Nathan Drake Chronicles, given that this is a prequel to the games — one which totally fucks up the chronology of that world, but whatever — that attempts to tell how treasure hunter Nathan Drake (Tom Holland) met his mentor and, later, best pal Sully (Marky Mark), as well documenting their first big adventure together. We come across young Drake for the first time as a bartender and small-time thief. Being an orphan, who was separated from his brother, Sam, following the pair’s attempted break-in at not-Harvard in Boston, Drake’s had to grow up a lot by himself, managing his life on the mean streets of NYC in ways legal and not (Holland has a pretty swell set of bartender skills, so if they’re ever trying to find a lead for a cocktail remake, he should be first in line). Sully, a treasure “acquisition specialist” and former helicopter pilot, meets him one night in the bar the kid’s working at and offers him a chance at a life of adventure and potential riches. He used to work with Nate’s brother, and he wants the kid’s help tackling the last hunt that Sam ever went on. See, Sam had an idea that Magellan’s ships were full of looted gold, and that if one were to find them, based on clues left by the men who survived the trek, they’d be valued in the billions. So, Nate signs on, and the pair are plunged into a world of intrigue, dodging Sully’s former flame (Tati Gabrielle) and her employer (Antonio Banderas) and entering into a partnership with Chloe (Sophia Ali), a shady yet kind-hearted fellow treasure hunter.
On a structural level, Fleischer’s film operates fully within the Marvel mindset of gag-sequence-gag, assisted by plentiful amounts of computer-generated imagery and easter eggs, and Marky Mark’s the only vaguely unstable or interesting element here. In hindsight, it feels weird to point out that he would have been a pretty decent choice to play Drake, back when David O. Russell was circling the project and Barack Obama was still president, though the fanbase made it seem like that casting was a betrayal of the franchise’s ethos. He might not have had the same cadence as Nolan North, the voice actor whose specific inflections and tics gave the character a life uncommonly seen in video games, but he would have been able to play off the treasure hunter’s cocksure attitude with more aplomb than what Holland’s able to do here. He’s not bad, per se, though it’s clear that his time in the Spider-Man trenches has successfully hampered his ability to do anything other than ceaselessly toss out quip and occasionally toss out the sad puppy-dog eyes when he gets betrayed. He’s not playful or mischievous enough to be truly rakish, which is why Marky Mark’s here in the first place. As a result, they can be kind of funny together, at least occasionally, but it’s a faint echo of the games, which have a sense of timing to their quips that Fleischer can only vaguely capture at the best of times.
Yet that’s only a small part of the overall problem with Uncharted. The games’ developer, Naughty Dog has become well-renowned for their visceral and well-constructed setpieces within their releases, which unfold like clockwork, provided that the player can keep up with them, and are delightfully engaging as experiences. The storytelling can be kind of lame and derivative of better cinematic art; the gameplay itself can grow tiresome in the more unfocused moments, like when Drake goes full mass-murderer on mercenaries despite it not being even vaguely hinted at within his character so that players don’t grow too bored; and it can be agonizing to fuck up in the middle of one of those big events and break the flow of the moment. Despite all of that, they’re unique AAA gaming experiences and are incredibly engaging and immersive, rightfully deserving the special place that they hold in the hearts of those who have played through them — or even those who have simply watched the games being played in front of them.
So, why on Earth would you ever want to watch a worse live-action version of those experiences, one that’s stuffed to the gills with worse CGI than in the games themselves are made out of and features most of those criticisms mentioned a little earlier? The fights are at least competently staged, but the setpieces, arguably the most essential aspect of an Uncharted experience, are disappointing echoes of the games, each of which made me just wish Fleischer had gone just a little bit smaller with their stunts so that he wouldn’t have to rely so hard on his digital effects team. The era of actually flinging an actor out of a jumbo jet will inevitably come to an end whenever Tom Cruise finally bites the bucket, but an approach that might have let the audience see some feats of real-life daring with tangible risks would have offered a concrete separation from the style of the games, which might have given Uncharted a semi-unique style, at least in comparison to the material it’s based on (it’d be hard to recommend watching Uncharted over even National Treasure, given how ludicrously goofy those movies are, as any comparison to Indiana Jones would come up short). At least the one truly brassy setpiece — an action scene between two pirate ships being airlifted by helicopter, complete with cannonballs and fighters swinging from ship to ship on ropes — is fun enough in concept to allow for some manner of awe-making, but given that it comes a full hour and a half into Uncharted, it’s far little, too late.