Street-smart Nathan Drake, is recruited by seasoned treasure hunter, Victor “Sully” Sullivan, to recover a fortune amassed by Ferdinand Magellan, and lost 500 years ago by the House of Moncada.
“Uncharted” is based on Sony’s video game series of the same name which premiered in 2007 with “Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune,” followed by three sequels, “Uncharted 2: Among Thieves” (2009), “Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception” (2011), and the final installment, “Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End” (2016). I am a huge video game player. Unfortunately, Sony Interactive Entertainment and the game’s developer, Naughty Dog, agreed that the series would only be available on Playstation systems and as I prefer Xbox, I’ve never had the opportunity to actually play the game but maybe that is why I enjoyed the movie because the film has been receiving a lot of negative reviews, especially in Europe where it has already been released. Having never played any of the games, I am reviewing the film based solely on its big-screen presentation.
Nathan Drake (Tom Holland) works as a bartender in New York and one evening, Victor “Sully” Sullivan (Mark Wahlberg), a fortune hunter, stops by the bar where Drake works and introduces himself. He informs Nathan that he worked with his older brother Sam while they were on a mission trying to locate treasure hidden by the Magellan crew of the 1500s and that he went missing. Initially, Nathan says he’s not interested, that Sam left him fifteen years earlier and never came back for him, but he changes his mind when he analyzes old postcards Sam sent him years earlier, realizing that each postcard had a hidden message internally implanted. Sully and Drake manage to steal a golden cross from an auction house where their competitor, Santiago Moncada (Antonio Banderas), is bidding on it. Santiago is the last descendant of the Moncada family, responsible for funding the original Magellan expedition, and he will stop at nothing to retrieve the cross.
With the cross in their possession, Sully and Drake head to Barcelona, where they team up with an old friend of Sully’s, Chloe Frazer (Sophia Ali), who happens to own another cross, and as legend has it, both crosses will be detrimental in locating the hidden treasure. After discovering a secret doorway in the back of Santa Maria del Pi, a 15th-century Gothic church, they encounter a hidden room filled with giant urns and smash them open, thinking that the gold is inside. Instead, they only find salt, but Drake’s attentive eye to detail unearths a map beneath the salt. It gives them the exact location of the gold, somewhere in the Philippines. Chloe then double-crosses them and steals the map and gives it to Moncada, revealing that she was initially hired by him before Sully and Drake even landed in Barcelona. Drake decides to go back to Sam’s old postcards, and they reveal even more information than Drake initially thought and armed with this new insight, he and Sully set out to reach the treasure before Moncada and Chloe.
Indiana Jones heavily influenced the video game “Uncharted,” and the movie is no different, with Holland pilfering a line directly from “Raiders,” and the filmmakers stealing the animated line traveling between destinations to distinguish where Sully and Drake are flying. One of the most significant action scenes, evident in the trailer, has Holland’s Drake hanging from the back of a large cargo plane. After releasing a series of connected cargo crates to allow him and Sully to escape, Drake’s foot gets entangled in one of the crate’s netting, and he is pulled out of the plane, left dangling in mid-air. He quickly regains his composure and begins jumping from crate to crate, outmaneuvering henchmen as he makes his way back up to the plane before the rope attached to all the adjoining crates comes apart. This should have been an exhilarating scene, but it’s apparent that it was shot entirely against a green screen, filled with copious amounts of background CGI.
There’s no way Drake would be able to casually jump from crate to crate while several thousand feet in the air, traveling at over 300 mph, the wind shear alone would make it impossible for anybody in his situation to do anything but dangle and while we most certainly have to suspend our disbelief during certain films, here, it is simply unattainable. This action scene was undoubtedly inspired by the 1987 James Bond film, “The Living Daylights,” which had Timothy Dalton’s Bond in a similar situation, but it was shot more convincingly, cutting between Dalton in a studio and real stuntmen genuinely hanging from the back of a C-130 Hercules. The remaining action set-pieces are entertaining, and both Holland and Wahlberg generate enough delectable banter that we can sit through some ridiculously excessive scenarios, including two airborne pirate ships and a plethora of campy dialogue. In the end, “Uncharted” adds nothing new to the list of video-game-to-big-screen adaptations, but if you can go in and switch off your brain for two hours, you might just enjoy yourself.
Exclusively In Theaters Friday, February 18th
