Uncharted
SONYAs the current Hollywood IP race continues on, studios find themselves clamoring for more and more “content”. This clamoring has led them back to the kind of IPs that have struggled within Hollywood, video game adaptions. Though they make money, they’re more than often loathed for trying too hard to be like the structure of a video game itself or for losing it’s identity along the way in terms of deviation of the source material. With game companies being more controlling of their properties, long gestating adaptations are finding new light; one such game being the Playstation exclusive series Uncharted from SONY and Naughty Dog.
Starring Tom Holland, Uncharted is a origin story of Nathan Drake, the intrepid lead of the game series, as he meets his partner Victor “Sully” Sullivan (Mark Wahlberg), who convinces Nathan to join him on the quest to find the long lost Moncada treasure. Along the way, Nathan meets Chloe Frazer, a partner of Sullys’ that holds a key to the treasure and butt-heads with Santiago Moncada (Antonio Banderas), heir to the Moncada fortune who has hired mercenary and also former partner to Sully, Jo Braddock (Tati Gabrielle), to help him find his families lost treasure.
Despite being of the biggest stars in the world right now, this is yet another non-Marvel film that finds Tom Holland completely out of his element. Though his boyish charm can work for him and he can nail the physicality, the boyishness ultimately plays against him with the type of character this film needed – imagine Mark Hamill playing Indiana Jones. Despite the chemistry between Holland and Wahlberg being a strong factor in the film being remotely enjoyable, Wahlberg also seems a bit lost with his role. He mostly sleep-walks his way through the feature and, thus, the character offers very little beyond vague banter and expositional dialogue to drum on momentum. Antonio Banderas, along with Tati Gabrielle, delivers serviceable and mostly one-dimensional turns as the film’s protagonists. But it’s Sophia Ali who delivers one of the better performances in the film as Nathan and Sully’s wary and untrustworthy partner, Chloe Frazer. As soon as she’s on screen, she has a natural chemistry with Holland and Wahlberg, making her feel like one of the few actors most comfortable with their character.
The film is directed by Ruben Fleisher, best known for Zombieland and Venom. Much like those previous films, Fleisher’s direction in Uncharted leaves much to be desired. His style – or lack thereof – runs through the generic action/adventure checklist of McGuffins: foreign bad guys and locales, double/triple crosses, miraculous escapes from the hidden tomb, the list goes on. The few places Fleisher excels in is bringing out the chemistry between Holland and Wahlberg and the film’s set pieces. Though being the centerpiece of the marketing and exposing more than it should in the process, the plane sequence remains a high point in the film. Albeit becoming exhausted through the promotional campaign and non-cyclical plot that pits the viewer in this sequence not once but twice, it pulls many elements from the game to build the whole feature more immersive with causal audiences and reminder for fans of the video game franchice that this is still indeed an adaption of their beloved Uncharted.
With styleless direction, generic storytelling and poor casting decisions, Ruben Fleisher’s Uncharted is mostly saved by decent – albeit saturated and conventional – set pieces and the surprising, though limited, chemistry between Holland and Wahlberg. SONY does, however, see a future for this franchise with not one but two post-credit sequences that work to bring a bigger world and echo moments of the video game’s history. But in a world of formulaic genre pieces in the cinematic medium, Uncharted needs to find a balance between convention and surprise – not an easy task for any film; made more problematic and worrying is SONY’s inability to truly lay the ground work for a franchise and universe with the likes of Spider-Man and Men in Black crumbling with seismic budgets and exhausted fan bases. That being said, with a few more moves behind the scenes, it is not to say that Uncharted could still surprise with its next direction but it will take a giant leap of faith to convince mass audiences otherwise.
