Uncharted Review – Familiar Territory

There’s probably not an easier game franchise to adapt into a movie than Uncharted. The games themselves mostly follow the formula of a summer blockbuster, and you can find fairly compelling videos on YouTube in which players have spliced together cutscenes to create something of a movie version of the games. As a film adaptation, Uncharted doesn’t really have far to go–but that also means it needs to bring something more to the experience that the games haven’t already covered. While the action scenes are exciting and the quips are fun, there’s not much to the movie version of Uncharted that sets it apart from similar blockbusters–or from the games themselves.

The gist of the Uncharted stories are all pretty much the same, and the movie borrows from the established formula: Charming adventurer Nathan Drake uses his encyclopedia-like knowledge of history to go after some long-lost treasure, racing some rich ne’er-do-wells who would use that treasure for various nefarious purposes. In the case of the film, that story also serves as Nate’s origin as a treasure hunter. In the Uncharted movie, we find a younger version of the character than the one seen in the games, played by Tom Holland (Spider-Man: No Way Home), as he’s first drawn into the globe-trotting treasure-hunt game by veteran antiquity scavenger Victor “Sully” Sullivan (Mark Wahlberg).

Both Nate and his brother, Sam (Rudy Pankow), are history-loving orphans descended from the famous explorer and privateer Sir Francis Drake. While we don’t get much of the backstory laid out during the games in the film, both are shown to be well-versed in history, and spent their childhoods dreaming of adventures and opportunities to strike it rich. When Sam is thrown out of the orphanage after one too many run-ins with the law, he promises he’ll return for the younger Nate sometime in the future. Years pass and after Nate’s rescue never comes, he winds up a blue-collar bartender who uses his charm and quick hands to lift valuables off the trust-funders populating New York, while carrying around some abandonment issues as well.