Uncharted (2022)
1/4
Assassin’s Creed, Max Payne, Warcraft, Tomb Raider, and Mortal Kombat. What do these five video-game franchises have in common? They all have some pretty awesome games that have been turned into piss-poor movies. Now a new video game has, sadly, been added to the list and that is through Ruben Fleischer’s new film Uncharted.
What makes this movie particularly frustrating is the fact that this is the one game franchise where each and every game has the the look and feel of a movie, so it shouldn’t be that hard to get right.
Unfortunately, thanks to a terrible script, wasted villains, and total disrespect to its best-selling source material, this video-game movie is just as bad as the countless video-game movies that have come before it, and it fails to capture what makes the games so unique in in the first place.
I will say that Tom Holland does try his hardest with the material he’s given. He has proven with his Spider-Man role and with this movie that he really puts in the physical work to portray his characters. This movie has him getting in fist fights, swinging on and off of chandeliers and even getting hit by a car while falling out of a plane. That’s very physical stuff and I had a blast watching him do all of that.
But that’s all I can really say that I enjoyed about this movie. Mark Wahlberg feels like he is more committed to portraying himself than his character, and Santiago Moncada, the supposed main villain—played by Antonio Banderas—is one of the laziest villains I have ever seen on screen. He contributes nothing to the movie and is not even the least bit threatening.
But the thing that really stinks about the film is its ridiculous script. Just the treasure-hunting aspect alone is complete nonsense. The clues to the treasure are in the dumbest places imaginable, such as in a Papa John’s or a nightclub. Yep, one of the essential elements to finding a 500-year-old treasure that nobody wants found is located in plain view behind one sheet of plexiglass inside a pizza joint.
That’s even stupider than that moment in 2004’s National Treasure where Nicolas Cage finds a treasure map on the back of the Declaration of Independence by covering the entire document with lemon juice.
The script also fails to surprise us in any way. It’s just a collection of scenes copied from the game and from movies like those in the Indiana Jones franchise mashed together. There’s nothing new here, and that is yet another element of the game that is sorely missed throughout the movie.
Holland puts in a committed performance, but Uncharted is still a very badly written and poorly constructed attempt at beating the video-game curse that is still haunting Hollywood to this day.