Written by Cameron Geiser

Adaptations can be tricky. Especially when the source material is as widely beloved as the video game series sharing the name of this film. For the adventure game series, itself a riff on the adventure storytelling style of Indiana Jones among others, this is a thoroughly *okay* film — but it lacks depth and clarity where the source material is concerned. The script barely reflects the personalities of the characters from the games and thus loses all nuance that the games' storytelling brought to the table. Okay, so what is Uncharted even about anyway? Well, first and foremost it's an adventure movie — one with a bit too much time spent in urban environments if you ask me — but I'm getting ahead of myself. The two most important pieces of the Uncharted puzzle are Nathan Drake and Victor 'Sully' Sullivan.

Nathan Drake (Tom Holland) is a young pickpocket bartender in New York City in the beginning of the film. Already, this feels a bit off. There's a bit of an attempt at a backstory with Nate and his brother Sam living in an orphanage, but the whole point is to set up Sam leaving his brother Nate as a kid, whom Nate never really sees again. This is a huge deviation already from the game's story, but, hey, at this point I figured there were going to be some changes. I did not realize just how far the film would deviate though. Mark Wahlberg as Sully is laughably bad. Not that Mark Wahlberg is a bad actor, it's that nothing of his performance accurately reflects who Sully is as a person… at all. To be fair, there was a line or two that made me think “Hey, that kinda sounds like something Sully would say” but it never lasted for more than a moment. More often than not, Wahlberg's Sully was greedier, less charismatic, and had none of the chortling warmth that most would consider signature aspects of the senior thief. As for Nathan Drake himself, Tom Holland had mere moments out of the whole film where his actions made him seem close to emulating the character of Nathan Drake. Put simply, I did not believe him as the character. Sure, this Drake is quippy at times, and he jumps and climbs, but there was none of the bravado, the cocksure attitude of a treasure hunter who was so sure of himself. Here, Nate is essentially Sully's sidekick, not his partner. Their dynamic is completely different from the games, and that changes things for this treasure hunt.

Which, by the way, the execution of the quest for treasure in this film wasn't all that interesting. The first game followed Drake tracking down the fortune of Sir Francis Drake, his assumed relative of the past. The story was built around the character's quest for identity and connection, instead that motivation goes to the villain of the film, Santiago Moncada, played with a delightful hamminess by Antonio Banderas. It's a shame his character wasn't utilized more, he seemed to fit the mold of your typical Uncharted villain quite well. Moncada's family legacy is tied to the ill-fated treasure from Magellan's journey, and he sees it as his birthright. Moncada and his family's vast resources were a serviceable threat within the adventure story structure, it’s too bad the film itself didn't have the heart or wit that the games' had in spades.

I don't want to seem unnecessarily harsh, but there seems to be a very surface-level understanding of what made the series and the characters so beloved in the first place. Oh, and I almost forgot: what happened to Elena?! The stubborn and optimistic journalist that was involved in every Uncharted game is nowhere to be seen in this film! Granted, they probably left Elena out of the first film hoping to introduce her in a sequel as Nate's true love interest; instead they opted for the second game's femme fatale firebrand in Chloe (Sophia Ali). Which, to be fair, Chloe was the closest in execution to her character in the game series. Speaking of cherry picking elements from all of the games, I must point out that simply picking visually entertaining set-pieces of the games and then dropping those pieces without the correct context makes for a vapid movie for mindless consumption. By the time we got to the sequence involving flying pirate ships, the movie was nearing Fast and Furious levels of stupidity and I was beginning to develop a headache. Look, this is a professionally made film, people worked hard on it, I'm sure. Too bad it was for a film where nothing of interest happened for roughly two hours.

Cameron Geiser is an avid consumer of films and books about filmmakers. He'll watch any film at least once, and can usually be spotted at the annual Traverse City Film Festival in Northern Michigan. He also writes about film over at www.spacecortezwrites.com.