Movie Review: “Uncharted,” aka Tom Holland’s Pecs– The Movie
By Will Dryden
If you like adventure, Tom Holland, heists, Tom Holland doing shirtless pullups, pirate ships, or Tom Holland in another white shirt that’s somehow gotten soaking wet again, odds are you’ll like “Uncharted.”
I went to see “Uncharted” with my two brothers. All three of us were big fans of the games and went in with minimal expectations. Our bar was lower than Southern Virginia University’s rejection rate. We were expecting a Great Value brand Indiana Jones, but ended up having a blast with some entertaining action scenes, decent writing, and an ending that left me ready for a sequel.
For those unaware, “Uncharted” is a movie based on a series of PlayStation games of the same name. They tell the story of Nathan Drake, treasure hunter, and his cast of companions, like his girlfriend (later wife) Elena Fisher, or his mentor Victor Sullivan (but everyone calls him Sully). The movie doesn’t directly adapt any single game, instead choosing to tell an origin story of how Nathan (played by Tom Holland) met Sully (played by Mark Wahlberg).
If you’re a fan of the games, I’d say you’re getting just the right amount of pandering. There are a couple references, some more obvious than others. The entire airplane scene from the third game plays out pretty much beat for beat, and the ending feels like it was ripped straight from the fourth. There’s some pretty great moments where the soundtrack whips out the main theme from the games, but my personal favorite was the cameo from Nathan Drake’s voice actor, Nolan North. It’s always great to see voice actors getting the credit they deserve.
See, in a video game, you immediately have a connection to the characters, because you’re them. You’re not watching Nathan Drake jump out of a helicopter. You ARE Nathan Drake jumping out of a helicopter. Games are also much longer than movies, with a good twenty to thirty hours to tell their stories and get you invested in their characters. A movie doesn’t have that luxury. With good enough writing, it can fix that. But this one didn’t. And honestly, I’m not really sure it wanted to.
I may not have cared much about the emotional journey of Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg, but I don’t think the movie did either. It just wanted me to stuff some popcorn in my mouth and watch pirate ships dangling from helicopters fighting in the air. And I’m fine with that. This is a movie that definitely knows what it wants to be, and sticks with that. It doesn’t do it perfectly, or pull any new, amazing tricks. But it’s entertaining, and Mark Wahlberg fights someone in a Papa John’s for ten minutes, and that’s alright.
That being said, the first twenty minutes are a trainwreck. Everything is going way too fast, and every line is either exposition or a bland, Marvel-style joke. Initially, the characters feel extremely generic.
Beneath a couple superficial traits like being rich or into history, they’re the same cookie-cutter, snarky, wise-guy that’s starred in every action movie for the last five years.
The biggest problem with “Uncharted” is just that there’s not enough of the stuff it’s really good at, and too much of the things it’s not. There’s a great scene where Tom Holland fights someone behind a bar at a nightclub using a lot of fancy tricks established earlier in a scene where he’s at his job working as a bartender. It’s well done, well choreographed, fun to watch, and over in about a minute so we can go watch Tom Holland spend more time with the least interesting character in the movie, a girl named Chloe (actually, she’s the second least interesting. The least interesting is the antagonist, who’s constantly outdone by Antonio Banderas as a much cooler, better, secondary antagonist).
While it’s not perfect, “Uncharted” is a movie that does its job. Even though it took a while, I did grow to like the characters by the end, and it left me wanting more of them, more of their adventures, and more action, which, in this day of franchises and cinematic universes, is definitely what the studio wanted. So like it or not, we’re in for another five years at least of wet Tom Holland pecs.
