movie review on uncharted

How is a movie based on a video game more soulless than the game itself? The knock against the world of gaming has long been that they lack a human element, but Ruben Fleischer ’s “Uncharted” feels emptier than the award-winning franchise on which it’s based. Dominated by green screen special effects and thin treasure-hunt plotting, “Uncharted” fundamentally lacks the sense of adventure that turned the Sony games into some of the most beloved of all time. What’s most startling is how much the games themselves feel more cinematic in terms of world building, character, and narrative than the actual movie. It’s not quite as disastrous as some video game adaptations, and it’s at least light enough on its feet to never insult the intelligence of its fan base as so many of these movies tend to do. However, “Uncharted” seems to want to ride the goodwill of the video game adventures of Nathan Drake more than create any of its own; it takes no risks and feels like a bare minimum effort in terms of storytelling. Roger famously said that video games can never be art . The ones on which this movie is based are certainly more artistic.

Nathan Drake ( Tom Holland ) was conceived as a throwback to Indiana Jones and the serial adventure films that inspired him. He should be a smooth-talking treasure hunter, someone who exists in a slightly gray moral area wherein stealing priceless artifacts is warranted because no one else can really appreciate them like Drake. Holland has the agility but quite simply lacks the weight and world-weariness needed for a character like Drake, who was raised in an orphanage and is willing to steal to make ends meet. If Indiana was typically the smartest person in a room, Drake needs to be the one with the sharpest instincts, someone who sees the puzzles of history from a place of expertise and courage. Holland is a smart actor, but he’s just wrong here, always looking a little bit like a kid dressing up as his favorite video game character.

While working at a bar and stealing jewelry from his patrons, Drake is approached by Victor Sullivan aka Sully ( Mark Wahlberg ), who tells him that he got close to one of the most famous lost treasures in history with Nathan’s brother Sam. They stole the diary of the famous explorer Juan Sebastian Elcano, which will guide them to treasure that was hidden by the Magellan expedition. They quickly cross paths with Santiago Moncada (an Antonio Banderas so underutilized that one has to believe half his part was cut), the heir to the family that funded the original expedition. Moncada’s will is enforced by the tough Jo Braddock ( Tati Gabrielle ) and the boys reunite with an old colleague of Sully’s in Barcelona named Chloe Frazier ( Sophia Ali , who pretty much steals the movie).

“Uncharted” bounces these characters off each other on a journey to Spain and the Philippines, but nothing has any weight to it. It’s green screen performing that ignores how much setting can matter in a film like this one. Design never once feels like a consideration, whether Nathan and Chloe are crawling through a nondescript tunnel to hidden treasure or Sully is getting into one of the few fight scenes in an actual Papa John’s. A film like “Uncharted” needs to transport audiences. We need to go on the journey, not just watch actors pretend to fall out of planes. The “Uncharted” games take players around the world. You’ll never once get that feeling during this cold, distant adventure film.

If anything saves “Uncharted” from the depths of the worst video game adaptations, it’s the relative charm of the cast. Holland may be miscast, but he’s just an incredibly likable movie star, and I hope he can find parts that better utilize his charms. Wahlberg creates a nice balance between his charisma and the exhausted tone of a treasure hunter who has seen and done enough, and just wants that final gig that can set him up for life. Banderas is wasted and Gabrielle is inconsistent, but Ali is arguably the one performer who gets that “Uncharted” should be fun. She gives the film some much-needed energy and unpredictability when she’s on-screen.

“Uncharted” is another one of those projects that has been through so many potential production teams over the years that it lost its identity. There are reports going back to 2008 about different filmmakers trying to get this movie made and David O. Russell , Neil Burger , Joe Carnahan , Shawn Levy , Dan Trachtenberg , and Travis Knight were all rumored or even attached at different points. When a project goes through so many iterations over the years, it can often lead to a final film that feels like a compromise, a watered-down version that took the most common, most basic elements of everything that had been suggested over the years. “Uncharted” checks boxes for fans and newbies but does so in such a predictable manner that it lacks any edge or spark. I’ve played through some of the “Uncharted” games from beginning to end more than once, a multiple-hour commitment. It may only take two to watch it, but I’ll probably never see this movie again.

Opens in theaters on Friday, February 18 th .

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

• Tom Holland as Nathan Drake
• Mark Wahlberg as Victor 'Sully' Sullivan
• Antonio Banderas as Santiago Moncada
• Sophia Ali as Chloe Frazer
• Tati Gabrielle as Braddock
• Steven Waddington as The Scotsman
• Pingi Moli as Hugo
• Matt Holloway
• Rafe Judkins
• Chris Lebenzon
• Richard Pearson

Cinematographer

• Chung-hoon Chung

Writer (story)

• Jon Hanley Rosenberg
• Mark D. Walker
• Ramin Djawadi
• Ruben Fleischer

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Tom holland and mark wahlberg in ‘uncharted’: film review.

Holland takes a breather from web-spinning to play treasure hunter Nathan Drake in this cinematic adaptation of the hugely popular PlayStation video game series.

By Frank Scheck

Frank Scheck

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This weekend, you’ll be able to go to theaters and see a highly entertaining thrill ride of a movie, featuring Tom Holland performing death-defying stunts and spending a good portion of the film’s running time engaging in witty banter and flying through the air.

I’m talking, of course, about Spider-Man: No Way Home .

Release date: Friday, Feb. 18

Cast: Tom Holland, Mark Wahlberg, Sophia Ali, Tati Gabrielle, Antonio Banderas

Director: Ruben Fleischer

Screenwriters: Rafe Lee Judkins, Art Marcum, Matt Holloway

Oh, there’s also Uncharted , the feature film version of the hit PlayStation video game series, starring Holland as globe-trotting, history-obsessed treasure hunter Nathan Drake and Mark Wahlberg as Victor “Sully” Sullivan, Nathan’s shady mentor. The film deviates from the video games in a number of ways, being an origin story featuring younger versions of the beloved characters. And if you’re thinking that Wahlberg once would have been a great choice to play Nathan himself, you’re not alone. The film has been in development for so many years that he was formerly attached to play the role until he eventually aged out of it.

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Resembling the love child of Tomb Raider , Raiders of the Lost Ark and National Treasure , Uncharted definitely feels like a video game adaptation, so rapidly segueing from one elaborate action set piece to another that your fingers may start twitching while watching it.  Director Ruben Fleischer knows his way around this sort of material, having previously helmed such movies as Venom and Zombieland , and he understands that the target audience isn’t particularly interested in deep characterizations or sophisticated dialogue.

Still, it would have been nice if screenwriters Rafe Lee Judkins, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway had come up with something more interesting than this generic adventure in which Nate and Sully team up to first commit a robbery at a high-end auction house and then head to exotic locales in search of Ferdinand Magellan’s lost treasure of gold. Or more interesting villains than the ruthless Santiago Moncada, played by Antonio Banderas in a performance that can best be described as detached. Or wittier exchanges than Sully constantly teasing Nate about his gum-chewing and Nate responding in kind about Sully’s habit of leaving too many open apps on his cell phone.

More problematically, Nate and Sully, mutually supportive in the games, here come across like a bickering couple on the verge of divorce. Wahlberg’s Sully looks and behaves disgruntled so much of the time that you begin to wonder how these two went on to form a long-running partnership. (Or maybe the actor was just annoyed at disappearing from the story for long stretches of time.)

This star vehicle doesn’t exactly feel like a stretch for Holland, since his Nate, an expert pickpocket, is basically a more larcenous Peter Parker minus the web-spinning — at one point, he apologizes to a bad guy he’s just sent plummeting to his death, which is exactly what Peter would do. As made evident by his many shirtless scenes, the actor clearly buffed up for the role, the better to perform the numerous high-octane stunts that include falling out of an airplane and a lengthy parkour-style foot chase.

The film features plenty of photogenic real-life locations and some genuinely exciting action sequences, including the aforementioned airplane scene — which opens the film and is reprised later on — and a breathless battle involving airborne 16 th -century sailing ships.

Refreshingly, it’s the female characters who are the most badass. Sully’s longtime treasure hunting associate Chloe Frazer (a charismatic Sophie Ali) more than keeps up with the guys when it comes to physical derring-do, and Moncado’s blade-wielding henchwoman Braddock (Tati Gabrielle, fearsome) is a homicidal villainess who could give James Bond a run for his money.

You can’t say that the makers of Uncharted lack confidence, since the film ends with the sort of cliffhanger that basically promises a sequel. It’s a bold move, considering the number of video game film adaptations that have crashed and burned, but with the charismatic Holland as its star, it just may pay off.

Full credits

Production companies: Arad Productions, Atlas Entertainment, PlayStation Productions Distributor: Columbia Pictures Cast: Tom Holland, Mark Wahlberg, Sophia Ali, Tati Gabrielle, Antonio Banderas Director: Ruben Fleischer Screenwriters: Rafe Lee Judkins, Art Marcum, Matt Holloway Producers: Charles Roven, Avi Arad, Alex Gartner, Ari Arad Executive producers: Ruben Fleischer, Robert J. Dohrmann, David Bernad, Tom Holland, Asad Qizilbash, Carter Swan, Neil Druckmann, Evan Wells, Art Marcum, Matt Holloway Director of photography: Chung-hoon Chung Production designer: Shepherd Frankel Editors: Chris Lebenzon, Richard Pearson Costume designer: Marlene Stewart Composer: Ramin Djawadi Casting: Priscilla John, Orla Maxwell, Yael Moreno, John Papsidera, Anna-Lena Slater

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The critics must be crazy: tom holland’s ‘uncharted’ movie is great.

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Uncharted is a swashbuckling good time. The critics must be crazy.

Uncharted is a swashbuckling good time—a film that deviates in some ways from the video games, but sticks to their spirit, aesthetic and themes in every way that counts.

While I never pictured Tom Holland as Nathan Drake, he works quite well as a younger version of the treasure hunter we’ve come to know and love in the PlayStation exclusives from Naughty Dog.

The movie version differs in many ways from the games, but draws from them in all the ways that count: There are familiar set-pieces—the plane, the lost pirate ship, the Catholic orphanage—and scenarios—Nathan’s long-lost brother, Sam and the mystery surrounding his disappearance—and, of course, the cast of beloved characters.

While Mark Wahlberg’s Victor “Sully” Sullivan is quite a bit different from the video game version, I was actually pleasantly surprised by his performance. Wahlberg and Holland play well off one another, and as a “young Drake” and “young Sully” pairing, they pull it off. Again, we’re in “spirit of the games” territory here more than simply the look.

Holland doesn’t really look like Nathan Drake and Wahlberg doesn’t really look like Sully, but they still manage to bring the duo to life. Unlike the games, this is the story of the beginning of their partnership (and friendship) rather than a relationship that’s been built up over decades.

I liked the rest of the cast as well. Sophia Ali as Chloe Frazer, and Tati Gabrielle as the villain, Jo Braddock, are both solid casting choices, though Braddock never really becomes anything more than a one-note villain.

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As for the rest of the movie, it sits nicely in the “big cinematic action-adventure-treasure-heist” genre that the Uncharted games occupy. The story isn’t anything to write home about, but it’s perfectly fine and entertaining. There’s plenty of double-crossing, lots of jaw-dropping action and a good dose of humor throughout.

One thing I think the film does incredibly well is capture the spirit of puzzle-solving and tomb-raiding that the Uncharted game franchise is known for. It’s a pitch-perfect rendition of the many absurd puzzles we encounter in the games.

I always ask myself, “What kind of pirate buries their treasure and then concocts all these incredibly meticulous, over-the-top puzzles and booby-traps just to find the map?” It’s absurd but in a fun, engrossing way—just like the games, which themselves are based off of Indiana Jones and The Goonies and other similar adventure stories, all of which I also love.

To be fair, I’m not sure I’d place Uncharted the movie on the same pedestal as Indiana Jones or The Goonies, but then again this is just the first outing in what I hope becomes a new movie franchise. The movie has clearly been set up with a sequel in mind, and I can imagine it growing into its own shoes, so to speak. Also, any critic worth their salt should remember that the pedestal we place classic films on is one bulwarked by nostalgia.

A child who grows up on Holland’s Uncharted may look back on it with the same fondness I look back on The Last Crusade (though how can you beat Harrison Ford and Sean Connery as Indiana and his father?)

It’s not a perfect movie, no doubt, with perhaps a bit too much reliance on CGI and incompetent bad guys, but overall I enjoyed it a great deal. It also did two things better than the games: Not as much climbing and not as much shooting. I’ll have more to say about that in a separate piece.

The Critics Must Be Crazy

Critics are wrong about Tom Holland's 'Uncharted'

As you can see, I am in the minority of critics on this one—but well within the majority when it comes to the audience reaction. This is a huge disparity, too. Just 40% of critics give Uncharted a passing grade , while 90% of viewers enjoyed the film. The movie’s Cinema Score rating is “B+” which, while not as good as an “A” obviously, is still well above what we’d expect from such a Rotten tomato.

The action-disaster film Moonfall, for instance, received a 38% critic score on RT, with a 70% audience score—and a C+ Cinema Score (which is based on polling audiences directly as they leave theaters) . Viewers are not as happy with that one as they are Uncharted, though still generally more positive than critics. But the critical reception is almost identical to Uncharted.

Actually, there’s not much to report about the why behind critics’ distaste for this film. Many just found it bland or mediocre. Some critics who were fans of the games thought it didn’t live up to the source material, which is fair enough, though I think it’s pretty hard to adapt a video game and this one has more faithfully than most. Others called it an “Indiana Jones wannabee” which, well, yeah that’s kind of the point.

I wondered if we’d see any commentary on the fact that two white dudes were the heroes of the story while a Latin guy and a black chick were the villains—but I haven’t seen any so far, so that’s good! I think it’s great to see a diverse cast, regardless of who plays the hero and who plays the villain ( which is also why I’m not swayed by arguments that movies like Black Widow are somehow anti-male ).

I have noticed, in the past, certain ideological bents to these wildly disparate critic and audience scores. When I wrote about Ghostbusters: Afterlife for this very reason , I touched on this same question. Some critics still seemed angry that the all-female Ghostbusters didn’t make a splash, and viewed the new picture as revanchist (in ways it really wasn’t at all). All that culture war nonsense that plagued the first Ghostbusters reboot carried over to this one, and more’s the pity.

Again, I’m not going to say that Uncharted was the perfect movie, but as far as video game adaptations go it was a solid effort, and felt very true to the games. I think I went in with pretty low expectations, and ended up being pleasantly surprised. I think a “B+” is about right, though grading on a “video game adaptation” curve I’d go a bit higher.

A fun, rollicking adventure flick with likable protagonists, fun puzzles and big set-pieces—what’s not to love? Isn’t that basically the gist of the games?

Tomb Raider (2018)

P.S. It’s interesting that 2018’s Tomb Raider reboot scored so evenly among critics and audiences, with the former at 52% and the latter at 55% on Rotten Tomatoes.

I thought that was a really good adaptation of the rebooted video game franchise , and I think Walton Goggins’s Mathias Vogel was a far more interesting villain than any of Uncharted’s bad guys .

But what that film lacked, Uncharted has in spades: Namely, the Drake/Sully duo and a lot of exciting tomb-raiding / puzzle-solving. But I enjoyed Tomb Raider also, if not quite as much. And not just because I’m an Alicia Vikander fanboy, either, though she did a terrific job as Lara Croft.

Both Uncharted and Tomb Raider strike me as solid first entries in potentially very fun film franchises. Fortunately, Tomb Raider’s sequel is still in the works, now under the stewardship of Lovecraft Country’s Misha Green; and Uncharted is a box-office hit , leading Motion Picture Group Chairman and CEO Tom Rothman to call it a “a new hit movie franchise.”

Now we just have to wait until 2023 for HBO’s The Last Of Us, the second Naughty Dog game series to be adapted, this time for the small-screen. Don’t expect as many laughs, or as many hijinks, with the Pedro Pascal-led drama, however. While Uncharted can go dark sometimes, The Last Of Us basically lives in darkness.

What did you think of Uncharted ? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook .

If you want, you can also sign up for my diabolical newsletter on Substack and subscribe to my YouTube channel .

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‘Uncharted’ Review: Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg in a Video-Game Movie That’s Better Than Most of Them (but That’s Not Saying Much)

It's watchable in a thin "Raiders of the Lost National Treasure of the Fast & Furious Caribbean" way.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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I try to go into every movie with open eyes and an open mind, but I confess that this Buddhist goal can be seriously tested by the prospect of sitting through a video-game movie. Sorry, but I’ve been burned too often — by “Super Mario Bros.” (the first one out of the gate, back in 1993), by “Street Fighter” and “Mortal Kombat” and their sequels, by the 637 “Resident Evil” films, by the operatic death-plunge bombast of “Assassins’ Creed,” which looked like it was adapted from the 100 greatest prog-rock album covers. Are there good video-game movies? I enjoyed the 2018 reboot of “Tomb Raider.” The audiences for these films, who tend to be steeped in the games, would say that any number of them are good. But for those like me, who are looking at the movies as movies rather than live-action adjuncts, there can be a sludgy sameness to them: the kinetic fight-club visuals, the skeletal scripts, the “world-building” that starts to look like a series of digital-production-design show reels.

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But “ Uncharted ,” based on the Naughty Dog game whose first installment dropped on PlayStation in 2007, is at least trying for something. It’s built around an appealing pair of actors: Tom Holland , who I think registers more vividly as he grows less boyish (he’s in a more rough-and-tumble mode here), and Mark Wahlberg , who knows how to play a hard-ass who is also a trickster. (It’s no insult to Wahlberg to say that his intelligence is his secret weapon.) Holland is Nate Drake, the valiant but naïve adventurer hero, and Wahlberg is Victor Sullivan, who becomes Nate’s mentor by recruiting him to go on a mission to find the legendary stash of gold, which is essentially pirate booty, that was discovered 500 years ago during the around-the-world expedition of Ferdinand Magellan. Can you say “Raiders of the Lost National Treasure of the Fast & Furious Caribbean”?

“Uncharted” opens on one of those leap-ahead-to-the-middle-of-the-story moments, so that the film can entice us with its most astonishing sequence: an unintentional airplane escape, with Nate, having fallen out of the plane, shimmying across a roped chain of bulky oversize packing cubes, each equipped with a parachute — a sequence that may sound standard, but the technology for this kind of thing has advanced, so that it’s done in a seemingly all-in-one-shot breathless way, until you could swear that Tom Holland is actually thousands of feet up in the air, hanging on with one finger. It’s the kind of sequence that makes the video-game-movie skeptic in me sit back and say, “Okay, cool, I’ll go with this.”

Back on the ground, before all that happened, Nate is a New York bartender who’s also a pickpocket and a loner, because he grew up in the St. Francis Boys Orphanage with his older brother, Sam (Rudy Pankow), who got kicked out, leaving the 10-year-old Nate to fend for himself. When Wahlberg’s Sully shows up out of the blue, it’s not really a coincidence — all the connections in the movie trace back to Nate’s vanished sibling — but these two are still thrown together as if they’d been assigned to the same cop car. “Uncharted” is a buddy movie that takes place in the air, on the water, and in tombs with mechanical puzzle entrances tucked away in the catacombs of Barcelona.

In a fun early sequence, Nate and Sully infiltrate an auction so they can steal its prize antique: a dripped-gold ruby-studded key that looks like an ornate cross. There are two of the keys out there, and for them to work you need both. The pair’s rival in all this is Santiago Moncada, whose ancestors funded the Magellan mission; he’s played by Antonio Banderas , who glowers in one-dimensional villain mode. “Uncharted” is essentially an action thriller about two lethally competing scavenger-hunt teams.

Directed by Ruben Fleischer, who made “Venom” and the “Zombieland” films, the movie is less obviously video-game-ish than most entries in the genre. Yet after the initial fireworks, you begin to see the design of the thing. “Uncharted” must have looked like a natural movie to make, because the game it’s based on is so “cinematic.” But what that means, in practice, is that the game crossbreeds legendary movie tropes in an abstract way, and when they’re adapted back to the big screen the abstraction is still there. “Uncharted” is a lively but thinly scripted and overlong mad-dash caper movie, propelled by actors you wish, after a while, had more interesting things to say and do.

In a scene that takes place in a bedroom between Nate and Chloe (Sophia Ali), who has the other golden cross, I was struck by how the movie makes a point of showing off the very buff Holland, but what would have been a romance a decade ago is now…not a romance. (Maybe it’s set to become one?) I’m not saying the film needed a cliché love story to snuggle up against its other clichés, but at least it would have been an additional element. The vibe of “Uncharted” is breathless and a bit neutral. I chuckled at the Scottish hooligan (Steven Waddington) with a brogue so thick that Nate has to ask him to repeat his threats just so he can understand them, and I enjoyed the playful way Wahlberg suggests that his character might be a scoundrel. The climax, in which Magellan’s ancient ships are hoisted into the Philippines by bottomless helicopters, is both absurd and spectacular — a nice combo. But if you sit through the credits, you get not one but two separate preview sequences, the second one hidden like an Easter Egg. I don’t know if I’d call that presumptuous, but I’d definitely call it optimism.

Reviewed at AMC Lincoln Square, Feb. 14, 2022. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 116 MIN.

• Production: A Sony Pictures Releasing release of a Columbia Pictures, Arad Productions, Atlas Entertainment, PlayStaytion Productions production. Producers: Charles Roven, Avi Arad, Alex Gartner, Ari Arad. Executive producers: Ruben Fleischer, Robert J. Dohrmann, David Bernad, Tom Holland, Asad Qizilbash, Carter Swan, Neil Druckman, Evan Wells, Art Marcum, Matt Holloway.
• Crew: Director: Ruben Fleischer. Screenplay: Rafe Lee Judkins, Jon Hanley Rosenberg, Mark. D. Walker. Camera: Chung-hoon Chung. Editors: Chris Lebenzon, Richard Pearson. Music: Ramin Djawadi.
• With: Tom Holland, Mark Wahlberg, Sophia All, Tati Gabrielle, Antonio Banderas.

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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. 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. 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.

• Ruben Fleischer
• Rafe Judkins
• Matt Holloway
• Tom Holland
• Mark Wahlberg
• Antonio Banderas
• 1.8K User reviews
• 273 Critic reviews
• 45 Metascore
• 5 nominations

Top cast 32

• Nathan Drake

• Victor Sullivan

• Santiago Moncada

• Chloe Frazer

• Jo Braddock

• The Scotsman

• Guard at Museum

• Sister Bernadette

• Police Officer

• Unsuspecting Doorman

• Luxury Sedan Driver

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Did you know

• Trivia The film is the first feature production of Sony's PlayStation Productions.
• Goofs As depicted in the film, the types of ships used by Magellan on his voyage were carracks. At the time of their use, these were not ships known for their resistance to the elements. In fact, constant maintenance was required lest they literally deteriorate while in use. Such ships, after having been abandoned and partially submerged, while also in a tropical climate, would likely have rotted away to nothing after such a time.

Hotel Guest : [on seeing Nate and Chloe coming out of the ocean] Whoa! What the hell happened to you two?

Nathan Drake : [exasperated] Fell out of a car that fell out of a plane.

Hotel Guest : [bluntly] Huh. You know something like that happened to me once.

• Crazy credits There are two post credit scenes, one of which plays right after the movie finishes
• Connections Featured in Chris Stuckmann Movie Reviews: Uncharted (2022)
• Soundtracks Hello Hello Hello Written by Jared Solomon and Remi Wolf Performed by Remi Wolf Courtesy of Island Records Under license from Universal Music Enterprises

User reviews 1.8K

• paul_haakonsen
• Feb 12, 2022
• How long is Uncharted? Powered by Alexa
• February 18, 2022 (United States)
• United States
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• Uncharted: Fuera del mapa
• Lloret de Mar, Girona, Spain
• Columbia Pictures
• Arad Productions
• Atlas Entertainment
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $120,000,000 (estimated)
• $148,648,820
• $44,010,155
• Feb 20, 2022
• $407,141,258

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 56 minutes
• Dolby Digital
• IMAX 6-Track
• Dolby Atmos

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‘Uncharted’ Film Review: Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg in Breezy Video-Game Adaptation

Director Ruben Fleischer (“Zombieland”) turns in another cheerfully proficient, if personality-free, popcorn extravaganza

In the tradition of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “The Mummy,” “National Treasure” and “Jumanji,” “Uncharted” taps into a familiar tradition of globe-trotting, roguish adventure, and disguises the influence of those earlier films (and countless others) considerably better than you might expect.

Since making his debut with “Zombieland,” director Ruben Fleischer has developed an aptitude for cheerful proficiency (if not a ton of discernible personality) that he deploys to great effect in this brisk pastiche, especially with Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg bickering their way through one set piece after another.

Meanwhile, Sophia Ali and Tati Gabrielle steal much of the movie from their better-known co-stars with intriguing turns as competitors and more-than-equals for the prize Fleischer keeps tantalizingly out of reach from all of them.

An adaptation the Playstation video game of the same name, “Uncharted” stars Holland as Nathan Drake, an orphan obsessed with 16th-century explorers; he grows up to become a bartender and pickpocket after his older brother, Sam (Rudy Pankow), abandons him in childhood to avoid arrest. While living vicariously through the postcards Sam sends him from exotic, faraway lands, Nathan gets contacted by Victor “Sully” Sullivan (Wahlberg), a fortune hunter seeking his help to locate a treasure supposedly lost during Magellan’s trip around the world. Nathan reluctantly agrees in the hopes the journey will somehow reconnect him and his brother, but they soon run afoul of Santiago Moncada (Antonio Banderas), the son of a wealthy industrialist who wants to find Magellan’s gold for himself.

Collaborating with Chloe Frazer (Sophia Ali, “Grey’s Anatomy”), Nathan and Sully soon find themselves combing the streets of Barcelona looking for clues that might point to the location of the gold. But if Moncada’s limitless resources and ruthless determination don’t present big enough obstacles for the scrappy fortune-hunting trio, he also hires Jo Braddock (Tati Gabrielle, “You”), a former colleague of Sully’s, to match wits — and if necessary, weapons — with them to retrieve the treasure.

Like many of the performers that the Marvel Cinematic Universe catapulted to stardom seemingly overnight, Holland possesses an undeniable charisma and a sincerity on screen that makes him tirelessly likable, even when Nathan is pickpocketing a young customer at the bar where he works. Here, he possesses an almost Harold Lloyd–like quality where each of his stunts feel improvised and effortless at the same time, combined with an inner incredulity that he’s pulled off yet another feat of derring-do.

In fact, the only thing Holland seemingly cannot do is generate chemistry with Wahlberg as Sully, a counterpart and proxy brother with whom Nathan should be irresistibly clashing; instead, he limps through their interactions like scripted awards-show presentation banter.

Wahlberg shrewdly takes a back seat to Holland in the film, but his buddy-comedy bona fides flourish more when he’s pitted against a type that pushes him outside of his comfort zone. He seems unable to decide if Sully is truly a scoundrel, or actually a nice guy pretending to be tough, and it results in a toothless performance that creates no friction for Holland’s character, even after we discover a secret connection to Nathan’s brother’s fate.

As the third member of their team, Ali isn’t altogether convincing as a hard-shell fortune hunter toughened up by a life of loneliness and betrayal, but in comparison to Wahlberg, she and Holland have chemistry for days, and some of the film’s best sequences occur when the two of them share the screen. As Jo Braddock, meanwhile, Gabrielle is unfortunately saddled with an almost comically dopey villain role — there’s no opportunity to accomplish a task that she won’t tackle from the most counterintuitive approach possible — but she’s so magnetic on screen, whether she’s groveling to Banderas or pummeling Wahlberg, that you can’t take your eyes off of her.

Suffice it to say that action movies as a genre mostly abandoned the basic principles of physics long ago, but “Uncharted” indulges in some of the most preposterous sequences put on screen in a long time. No matter how skilled Holland might be at actually performing (or seeming to perform) Nathan’s parkour-influenced fighting style, the movie just keeps escalating the danger over and over without bothering to bring along a sense of danger or urgency. For example, a climb up a group of tethered equipment pallets hanging out of the back of a mid-air DC-10 was perhaps obviously always going to be silly, but Fleischer sacrifices suspense for momentum, so the scene becomes a showcase for the imagination of the film’s visual effects team instead of the characters we’re supposed to care about.

All of that said, it’s one of the first times I’ve watched a movie and thought “I’d like to play that game,” which may be a dubious accomplishment, but it speaks to the movie’s ultimate aims: namely, to re-create the serialized, task-oriented nature of its source material, which of course was cribbed liberally from the films listed above and the serials that in turn inspired them.

Four decades after Indiana Jones was dragged behind a truck, Nathan Drake aspires to be his next-generation counterpart — which is why only being towed behind an airplane will do. That doesn’t especially make “Uncharted” a great film, but for better or worse, you can probably feel the same level of satisfaction after watching Nathan complete just one or two of its single-serving challenges than in trying to lose yourself in the superficiality of the entire journey.

“Uncharted” opens in U.S. theaters Feb. 18.

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Uncharted Reviews

If you go in expecting a grand adventure, Uncharted likely won’t deliver. Temper your expectations and you’ll likely leave thinking that the film was decent enough, despite having faults

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 29, 2024

If this movie has taught me anything it’s that video game movie adaptations will never be a sustainable avenue for Hollywood.

Full Review | Original Score: D+ | Sep 23, 2023

What will be most frustrating for fans of the video game franchise and distributors Sony is that the film fails to deliver the same level of quality as its source material, though newcomers might find more to enjoy.

Full Review | Aug 8, 2023

Tom is a solid Nathan Drake Sophia is a great Chloe Mark was Mark…. Nothing against him but he was nothing like Sully. As a long time fan of this gaming series I wanted more & left frustrated even with the fun glimmers that were throughout the film

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

What started as a video game produced by Play Station became a movie that just doesn’t hit all the notes it desperately tries to.

Uncharted is an action-adventure flick, but despite a more entertaining last act, it fails to break the curse of videogame film adaptations due precisely to the lack of said action and adventure.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Jul 25, 2023

With a predictable plot, rudimentary puzzles, and strawman characters, Uncharted never manages to find its narrative bearings.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 25, 2023

Uncharted fails to provide the most basic principles of an adventure movie. It is underwhelming and overloaded, without the charm of its clearly Spielberg-ian roots.

Uncharted heads into familiar action-adventure territory making for a forgettable video game adaptation.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Dec 4, 2022

While Uncharted rarely veers away from the charted territory, the film has enough fun with itself for an enjoyable ride.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 5, 2022

If you squint hard enough, you'll see what makes Holland great—charm, charisma, aw-shucks levels of approachability—but none of it saves the flick from being utterly forgettable.

Full Review | Oct 12, 2022

Uncharted seems fresh in the era of superhero blockbusters. Saying it’s not as great as one of the best video game series ever shouldn’t be a massive indictment as it’s a fun ride with a clear respect for the source material.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Sep 10, 2022

A globe-hopping adventure that manages to be visually boring and charm-sucking.

Full Review | Aug 26, 2022

It’s a fun ride, and there’s a cool cameo for gamers to enjoy, but it is not quite the film I had hoped it would be.

Full Review | Aug 23, 2022

“Uncharted” really leans on its star power, especially Holland who plays a very Holland-like character – charismatic, boyishly charming, a bit daffy, and with an unshakable innocence (even when he tries to talk tough).

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 16, 2022

The film's secret weapon is Tom Holland's natural athleticism.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 10, 2022

If you are after a relatively generic action-adventure, Uncharted probably fits the bill – although a Marvel-like reliance on digital effects does let down its larger action sequences.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Aug 9, 2022

Amidst the lukewarm broth of deepfakes and green screen that make for the main entertainment of this film, there are very few fun, memorable moments except for the most stupid ones, and we'd rather forget about those. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Jul 11, 2022

There's just enough that gleams here to be watchable. It's a film with a few shiny coins in its bag, rather than a whole bar, cavern or ship of riches.

Full Review | Jun 25, 2022

Uncharted plays out like a very middle-of-the-road treasure hunt movie which emulates the likes of Indiana Jones and National Treasure and comes off as an uninventive re-tread.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 10, 2022

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The Uncharted movie double-crosses video game fans yet again

Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg take on the Nathan Drake and Sully roles in a film with none of the games’ stakes

by Robert Kojder

Uncharted game series protagonist Nathan Drake owns a ring he claims came from his forebear , explorer Sir Francis Drake. It’s engraved “Sic Parvis Magna,” or “Greatness from small beginnings.” The game series reflected that motto, with the modest first installment spawning three direct sequels, each better than the last.

But that greatness isn’t reflected in the movie version of Uncharted . It’s a small beginning for a possible Sony film franchise, but yet another dud of a video game adaptation. A glimmer of sequel potential is stowed away in a second post-credits scene, where a sudden burst of chemistry in the riffraff banter between treasure-hunting pals Nathan Drake (Tom Holland) and Victor Sullivan (Mark Wahlberg) is sure to make people wonder where such lively line deliveries have been for the last two hours. For one minute, everything about the characters feels right, but it comes far too late.

Throughout the film, Zombieland and Venom helmer Ruben Fleischer and screenwriters Rafe Judkins, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway ping-pong between as many game franchise characters and new additions as they can possibly cram into one origin story. In the game series, the characterization is more compact and robust. The Drake-and-Sully duo function as the thieving core in the first installment, before the designers expand their roster and flesh out their backstory in subsequent entries. The series’ villains have never been interesting, but there’s some personality behind motives like seeking the Tree of Life to gain eternal youth, or magicians attempting to fracture Nathan and Sully’s deeply established friendship. That verve is missing in the film version as well.

The film version feels like the writers were assigned different aspects of adapting the Uncharted formula: puzzle-solving, sneaking around, parkour, and larger-than-life action. The fragmented story makes it even more difficult for them to introduce and alternate between so many different characters. But even without the burden of introducing so many characters, the choices propelling Uncharted still lack stakes, genuine peril, fascinating twists on history, or adrenaline-pumping adventure.

Some of the action sequences are lifted straight from the games, most recognizably the much-advertised cargo-plane fight from Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception , where Nathan free falls to what seems like certain death. Fleischer and the writers find convenient ways to initiate the set piece — which in the games builds from a car chase in which the player jumps into the plane as it’s taking off on the runway — but in live-action it’s done with a blockbuster kitchen-sink method that can’t escalate the tension with so many characters in the mix. It’s admirable that they want to shake up the familiar elements, but there’s no weight or emotional gravitas to anything that happens. (Also, anyone who’s played these games knows nothing should come easy or convenient for Nathan Drake.)

The Uncharted games have never focused on realistic action, but some moments in the film adaptation still stretch the fantasy a bit too far. (There’s some business with a sports car that would make Dominic Toretto blush with embarrassment.) It’s as if no one bothered to consider how cartoonish chaos would come across in the context of a two-hour movie that veers between serious and lighthearted. There’s no room for any spectacle to stand out, or for the characters to develop a rapport organically. Various fight sequences are choppily and rapidly edited together, surrounded by obvious green screens. That’s a particular disappointment, considering the four mainline Uncharted games consistently pushed the boundaries of what the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 could achieve graphically.

Worst of all, the central characters lack even a trace of dimension. In defense of Tom Holland, his basic movements — punching combos, climbing, and positioning behind objects when sneaking — are so carefully calibrated to his video game counterpart that when no one is speaking, and there is a moment of coherence in the action, it’s briefly thrilling to see Drake brought to life so efficiently on the silver screen. Even the way Nathan Drake and Sully disperse upon entering a Barcelona church to look for clues feels like it’s modeled after the games, with the audience in the action, searching alongside the characters.

But from the moment Sully walks into a New York bar where Nathan is serving up drinks, being a know-it-all wise-ass, and pickpocketing patrons, the line readings feel forced in a manner that suggests neither of these performers has fully cracked how these characters bounce off each other. The script rarely gives them anything funny to say, which doesn’t help. Mark Wahlberg doesn’t even seem to be trying to replicate Sully, which makes it even stranger when he changes up his accent for one line to sound like him. The game’s version of the character is more of a sarcastic Bruce Campbell type than Marky Mark’s motormouth effusion. Even when Holland occasionally seems like a decent version of Nathan Drake, Wahlberg is usually in the same frame to obliterate the illusion.

Actors stepping into a video game adaptation don’t need to look or sound exactly like their digital counterparts. At the end of the day, all that matters is whether Uncharted the movie crackles as a quest for gold with likable characters. The problem is that it doesn’t. The version of Sully here is a much more selfish and greedy man who recruits Nathan to locate lost gold from a doomed Ferdinand Magellan expedition. Nathan is uninterested, until Sully mentions that he was trying to uncover the mystery with Nathan’s brother Sam, whom Nathan hasn’t seen since Sam ran away from the orphanage where they lived as children.

Nathan has some stashed-away postcards Sam sent him over the years, suggesting that he does still care about Nathan. (Besides, it wouldn’t be an Uncharted story without crumpled handwritten visual clues.) According to Sully, the final clue is hidden in them, and following the clues could let the brothers reunite. With his hunger for the gold and Nathan’s for reconciliation intertwined, they join forces.

Nathan comes into their first DIY field mission as a rookie who fumbles his plans and hasn’t gotten down the basics of jumping and swinging yet. That sequence — inspired by Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End — stands out slightly, given the sense that Nathan is actually in danger. But his flaws, and the life-or-death stakes, disappear in the blink of an eye. If the movie needs him to be good at something, he suddenly is.

Among the other game characters the film introduces, Sophia Ali manages the film’s best game-character mimicry as Sully’s partner in crime Chloe Frazer. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves implies Chloe and Nathan had a romantic past, but the movie doesn’t fill in any intriguing gaps, beyond how they met and how Nathan crushed on her. Instead, Uncharted uses all these characters and clues to set up a story about trust. Backstabbing takes center stage, but only as a mechanism to keep the plot going. None of these thieves can trust each other, which is par for the course in an Uncharted narrative, but there might be more double-crosses and betrayals here in two hours than there are in any one of the 12-to-15-hour games.

Hot on Drake and Sully’s tail is Antonio Banderas’ Santiago Moncada, the son of a wealthy businessman and descendent of the original Magellan expedition. Santiago sees himself as heir to the spoils and will stop at nothing to retrieve the fortune, especially since his father has no intentions of passing the family’s riches down to him. In a move that might be more unbelievable than all the action sequences combined, Santiago’s father is thinking about giving that wealth to the people as a means of taking accountability for the family’s tainted lineage. So the race is on for Santiago to beat the heroes to the treasure, and he enlists mercenary Jo Braddock (Tati Gabrielle, turning in a physically imposing performance) to get a leg up on Drake and Sully.

The filmmakers have the right idea of what makes an Uncharted action set piece, whether they’re molding a sequence after something from the games, or inventing something entirely new that would fit within one of them, like a bit involving characters battling inside pirate ships hoisted into the air by airplanes. But the execution is flat, inconsequential, and boring. Not even a remix of the Uncharted theme during a climactic shootout, padded up to that point by generic action muzak, brings joy.

One of the only laughs in the movie comes when Nathan Drake notices that even the bad guys are turning on one another. “Seems like it’s hard to keep a partner for long in this business,” he quips. It feels like something his game counterpart would say. Maybe someday, film adaptations of video games will stop betraying us by putting in minimal effort to acknowledge what fans enjoy about the source material, then failing to translate that vague understanding into onscreen excitement. Practically everyone here but Wahlberg is trying to ignite some sort of fire, but just as with the running gag about Nathan failing to properly use his trusty lighter, the spark keeps dying. Some things just aren’t destined for greatness.

Uncharted opens in theaters on Feb. 18.

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Uncharted Has Lots of Dimly Lit Secret Passages, Little Else

If you, like me, are a sucker for movies with dimly lit, cobweb-covered secret passages, then Uncharted offers something of a mixed bag. On the one hand, it’s a movie positively filled with dimly lit, cobweb-covered secret passages. On the other hand, such scenes are often presented so unimaginatively that they lack what we’re really looking for when we look for dimly lit, cobweb-covered secret passages: atmosphere and mystery.

Uncharted , directed by Ruben Fleischer and starring Mark Wahlberg and Tom Holland as a pair of adventurers traversing the world looking for lost treasure, is based on the popular video game, and you can sort of tell. It has the paint-by-numbers approach to character that often afflicts video-game movies, as if the filmmakers were worried that making their protagonists too distinctive might prevent us from being able to see ourselves in them. After all, spiritually speaking, if this is a game, we should be the ones playing it, right? (Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil managed to turn this quality into an asset by giving us a blank-slate hero whose mind had been wiped clean.)

As it is, the protagonists of Uncharted are blandly likable but not particularly interesting: Victor Sullivan (Wahlberg) is a globe-trotting veteran fortune hunter who connects with the younger Nate Drake (Holland), whom he finds working as a bartender and pickpocketing his customers. Victor (a.k.a. Sully), it turns out, used to work with Nate’s older brother, Sam (who went missing years ago, and whom we see in the film’s opening flashback saying good-bye to the young Nate), and wants Nate to join him in tracking down a legendary hidden treasure purported to have been found centuries ago by the explorer Ferdinand Magellan’s crew. Also looking for the treasure is Santiago Moncada (Antonio Banderas), a wealthy descendant of the family that funded Magellan’s original expedition, as well two other mercenary fortune hunters, Jo Braddock (Tati Gabrielle) and Chloe Frazer (Sophia Ali), both of whom have histories with Sully.

That’s not an unpromising setup: Everybody’s a thief, and they all distrust one another. But aside from a couple of predictable twists in allegiance, the script (by Rafe Lee Judkins, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway) does relatively little with that idea, in part because the story feels like it has been cobbled together from snippets of more accomplished movies: A little Pirates of the Caribbean and National Treasure here, a little Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and The Goonies there. Uncharted has been in the works for some years, with all sorts of big-name filmmakers and actors attached to it, which might explain the hodgepodge of references and influences. Derivativeness in and of itself is not a bad thing, but the movie seems uninterested in delivering any real surprises or creating any distinctive mood of its own.

Maybe it’s a video-game thing. Each scene in Uncharted seems to wipe clean the memory of the previous one. A bad guy left behind in another room doesn’t feel like much of a threat once you enter a new room. We’re told our heroes are brilliant, but that’s not really reflected in any of their banter. (“Holy shit” seems to be the go-to exclamation.) Nobody ever seems to use their wits, just the objects they possess. And none of the solutions to any of the film’s mysteries is particularly clever; they feel like they’re just there to advance our characters to the next plot point. (Surely the combined brainpower and salaries of all the screenwriters who have worked on this project over the past decade-plus could have come up with something more imaginative than … invisible ink?) Even the backstory of Nate’s brother, Sam, and the young man’s sorrow at his disappearance feel more like a dutiful bit of box-checking than anything that might provide emotional resonance. Maybe such disconnects happen because the film is obsessed with forward momentum. And it does bounce along fairly well; Uncharted is nothing if not fast. Alas, the movie rarely builds any real menace, so any excitement it might generate dissipates rather quickly.

There are two notable exceptions to the picture’s general sense of competent, corporate anonymity. Banderas does manage to give his character an entertainingly nasty sense of entitlement and gets some interesting (albeit brief) emotional shading in scenes with his aging, wealthy, idealistic father (Manuel de Blas). There’s also a tremendous climactic action sequence, involving a massive helicopter-and-pirate-ship chase, which delivers the kind of spectacle the rest of the film lacks. It’s intricate, exciting, even surprising; the whole movie might be worth it for that sequence alone. But such high points also serve to remind us of what we’ve been missing. Uncharted is not so much unenjoyable as it is curiously empty.

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‘Uncharted’ Review: Steal, Fight, Repeat

This inaptly titled treasure-hunt adventure recycles all the familiar clichés while giving Tom Holland a strenuous physical workout.

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By Manohla Dargis

At least give Sony credit for recycling. That is the best that can be said for its nitwit treasure-hunt movie “Uncharted,” an amalgam of clichés that were already past their sell-by date when Nicolas Cage plundered the box office in Disney’s “National Treasure” series. Now, it is Tom Holland’s turn to cash in with a musty story about ancient loot, old maps, lost ships, invisible ink and a wealthy scoundrel with disposable minions. But while he’s following in Cage’s inimitable footsteps, Holland also seems in training to become Tom Cruise 2.0.

The similarities between “Uncharted” and the first “National Treasure” are notable, with both movies adhering to the same booty-questing template. Each opens with a flashback of the protagonist as a wee lad eagerly being primed for adventure by an older male relative, a misty rite of passage that seems calculated to put a family-friendly stamp on an otherwise greed-driven setup. In “National Treasure,” the kid soon becomes a character played by Cage, whose singular, offbeat performance style can elevate and disrupt crummy material.

In “Uncharted,” the boy grows up to become a neo-buccaneer played by the boyish Holland, a likable, exuberantly physical performer who has traded his Spider-Man responsibilities for more old-school heroic duty. The Hollywood action movie seems an open field right now partly because most of the male stars who headline non-comic-book blockbusters are middle-aged or older. Holland is 25. He’s cute without being threatening or distractingly, Chalamet-esquely beautiful, and has enough presence and training ( dance, gymnastics, parkour ) that he can bluff and breeze past clichés while gracefully bouncing through fights and obstacles.

Cruise will be 61 when the next “Mission: Impossible” finally (maybe) opens in July 2023. He’s likely to keep going Energizer Bunny-style for years to come. Still, the paucity of young male actors who have the profile, credits and skill set to sell studio goods like “Uncharted” may prove a lucrative opportunity for Holland and his treasure-seeking handlers. At any rate that may explain the images of his character, Nate Drake, a thief who moonlights as a bartender (or vice versa), pulling some smooth moves on the job, a bit of juggling tomfoolery that instantly triggers images of Cruise in “Cocktail.”

Soon enough, though, Nate leaves behind his gig and his New York pad for an international escapade that he embarks on in tandem with Mark Wahlberg’s Sully, a more experienced, openly untrustworthy thief. A veteran of workaday blockbusters, Wahlberg serves twinned functions here as a presold pop-culture brand and an archetypal mentor for Nate. Sully can sprint, fight and trade unfunny quips without breaking a sweat, and Wahlberg is just fine delivering the same gruff, regular-guy performance that he always does. He shares top billing with Holland, but Wahlberg is largely onboard as training wheels for the younger actor.

“Uncharted” is based on a PlayStation game of the same name that first hit in 2007 and that tracks the globe-trotting doings of its Everyman hero, said to be descended from the British privateer Sir Francis Drake. The movie, directed by Ruben Fleischer, nods to the game and Sir Francis, who circumnavigated the globe in the 16th century and was instrumental in England’s challenge to Spain. Given the current climate, though, it’s a surprise that the movie didn’t quietly ignore Sir Francis, who participated in establishing the slave trade . In 2020, a statue of Sir Francis in Britain was draped in chains with a sign reading “decolonize history.”

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Uncharted’s road to gold is plagued by its bros

Drake and his dad in the club meets tomb raider.

By Charles Pulliam-Moore , a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

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Columbia Pictures’ new Uncharted movie from Venom director Ruben Fleischer is a testament to the idea that the longer much-buzzed-about adaptations of beloved franchises linger in development hell, the more likely they are to emerge from it — that is if they ever do — as warped misfires that might have been better kept in the drafts. Uncharted isn’t the first movie this is true of. But unlike so many other adaptations in this class, which tend to feel hamstrung by a lack of understanding of what people like about the source material, you do get the sense watching Uncharted that everyone involved vaguely “gets” what all the fuss is meant to be about. Uncharted knows what it’s supposed to be — the problem’s that it is profoundly uninterested in being that thing.

Uncharted draws upon elements from multiple Uncharted games in order to build a story around a younger, more inexperienced Nathan Drake (Tom Holland) who’s sucked into the jet setting, tomb raiding lifestyle after a not-so-chance encounter with conman / treasure hunter Victor “Sully” Sullivan (Mark Wahlberg). Though Nathan, a lonesome bartender with a troubled past and no close family in the present day, knows better than to trust smooth-talking strangers who pick pockets better than he does, Sully’s able to earn the younger man’s trust and recruit him onto a big job by playing up his connections and similarities to Nathan’s long-lost brother, Sam. 

Technically, Uncharted opens on one of its surprisingly few major set pieces that take place towards the end of the movie before jumping back in time to focus on Nathan and Sully’s meeting. But Nathan’s path to lost treasure actually begins back in his adolescence when he (Tiernan Jones in flashbacks) and Sam (Rudy Pankow) were just two wayward boys sneaking out of their orphanage to steal valuable pieces of history from museums, as children are wont to do. What Uncharted attempts to do in its opening scenes is convey to you how Nathan and Sam’s love for treasure hunting and their being ripped away from each other in their youth laid the groundwork for the adult Nathan to become the sort of person to be won over by Sully’s charms. But what Uncharted inadvertently ends up doing instead is drawing attention to its own indecision about who its main character is and what kind of people they are.

Uncharted can’t decide who its main character is

Watching Holland and Wahlberg try to play off of one another in basically any of the movie’s comedic scenes is like gazing into a sharp crystallization of just how fraught Uncharted ’s journey to the big screen was. Long before it shifts fully into action mode, Uncharted tries to sell you on the idea of itself as a buddy adventure flick. But the bulk of Nathan and Sully’s banter falls flat due to an unfortunate blend of questionable chemistry and hackneyed dialogue that makes even the dullest of video game cutscenes shine by comparison. 

Wahlberg, who was one of the frontrunners to play Drake over a decade ago, neither seems particularly excited about nor down on the idea of playing Sully — he just looms like a reminder of the Uncharted movie that could have been. Holland’s Nathan is, by comparison, the more engaging of the two characters, but the degree to which Uncharted attempts to rely on Holland’s boyish charm to carry it ends up hurting the film in a way that becomes progressively more noticeable as it goes on and more characters are introduced. This might not be such a glaring issue if Nathan and Sully’s brotherly camaraderie wasn’t meant to be Uncharted ’s beating heart, and if the film had the wherewithal to at least try to make some of its supporting characters feel like people instead of walking, talking callbacks to the games.

By the time that Nathan and Sully set out on their mission to track down a lost treasure hidden by Magellan’s crew, there’s still plenty of Uncharted to get through, but because the film can’t commit to a focus or a tone, it continues to feel much longer than it actually is all throughout.

The Uncharted franchise isn’t just Tomb Raider for Men™, but this movie is

Uncharted doesn’t really want you to think about why Sully and other hunters like Chloe Frazer (Sophia Ali) and Jo Braddock (Tati Gabrielle) are only able to finally start getting leads once Nathan shows up even though they’ve all been hunting for this specific treasure for ages. The movie also doesn’t especially want you to notice the fact that none of the puzzle solving or clue hunting that Nathan himself does appear to be very difficult or clever. What Uncharted does want, though, is to give you the feeling of being whisked away to gorgeous, foreign locales, where no one takes much of an issue with folks showing up to hack away at valuable pieces of history.

The Uncharted franchise has its merits and isn’t just Tomb Raider for Men™, but that’s definitely the impression one could take away from this film for a variety of reasons, including, but not limited to, its apparent allergy to developing female characters beyond being quippy prizes for its male leads to lust after. Uncharted ’s greatest sin, however, is the sureness with which it presents you with the potential for future installments — installments this movie’s ending neither earns nor warrants.

Uncharted also stars Antonio Banderas, Steven Waddington, and Pingi Moli and hits theaters on February 18th.

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Uncharted Review

11 Feb 2022

Back in 2011, in a commercial made for the Japanese market but which has since appeared online, Harrison Ford sat down in front of a TV to play the third video game in the Uncharted series. “Fantastic. Oh, incredible,” said the star, as he hammered the X button with his thumb. “So cinematic.” It was a publicity coup — the actual Indiana Jones stepping into the pixelly shoes of his gaming equivalent, Nathan Drake. It was yet more evidence that Uncharted — a brilliantly executed PlayStation adventure franchise which is, yes, cinematic as hell — was destined to become a film series too. But the ad also hinted strongly at the biggest problem facing anyone daring to take Drake to the big screen: the shadow of Spielberg’s Indy films, the gold standard for movies about treasure-hunters dodging dusty booby-traps and falling out of planes.

After roughly 15 years of development, Uncharted the movie is finally here. Dusty booby-traps and plummets from planes are present and correct. Alas, despite the promise and all that time expended, it’s disappointingly weak sauce. For die-hard fans of the games, there’s little that lives up to their ingeniously unfolding action set-pieces, such as the train sequence in Uncharted 2 which builds and builds in intensity until a cliffhanger that involves actual cliff-hanging, or the wild horseback gun-battle in part 3. Non-Drakeheads, meanwhile, are likely to wonder what all the fuss was about. What’s on screen is amiable enough, a hunt for $4 billion of pirate booty that involves a lot of double-crossing (plus, thanks to the film’s twin MacGuffin, a pair of crucifixes, a literal double-cross). But while it clearly aims for Raiders Of The Lost Ark — “When did you decide to become Indiana Jones?” someone says at one point, while our heroes’ trek is depicted by a red dotted line on a map, Indy-style — it lands somewhere around National Treasure 2 instead.

Antonio Banderas makes for a colourless villain, with monologues about “diversified investments” so inert that even his goons look bored.

Over the years, the search to fill the two lead roles — Drake and his grizzled mentor Sully — cycled through pretty much every actor in Hollywood with a gym membership card. It finally landed on Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg , two actors who can be charming and funny individually, but who struggle to muster up much in the way of comic chemistry here. It doesn’t help that the dialogue they’re given is significantly lamer than that uttered by their video-game counterparts; as they bicker in catacombs over ancient riddles (Wahlberg was at least well-cast in the sense that his resting expression suggests he is perpetually trying to crack an ancient riddle), scenes start to feel like cutscenes that you wish you could skip. Antonio Banderas , likewise, makes for a colourless villain, with monologues about “diversified investments” so inert that even his goons look bored.

There are moments when it jolts into life: a well-executed, lengthy single shot tracking Drake as he freefalls from an aircraft; some Goonies -esque underground map-syncing. But only the final 20 minutes, with a pirate-ship battle that takes to the skies, lives up to the giddy, inventive spectacle of the source material. Otherwise, Uncharted plods around an all-too-familiar map.

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'Uncharted' Review: Tom Holland Wins Gold in Indiana Jones Retread

Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg search for treasure but only dig up a watchably silly video game adaptation.

Wahlberg and Holland take Nathan Drake into Uncharted territory.

Uncharted adapts a video game, but you don't have to be a gamer to see where it lifts its inspiration. This new flick is about treasure hunters stealing ancient gold, but the bigger theft is the film's unabashed thieving from Indiana Jones, Ocean's Eleven and Pirates of the Caribbean. Still, if anyone can carry off such brazen burglary, it's smooth criminal Tom Holland, following Marvel (and Sony's) smash hit  Spider-Man: No Way Home with a breezy romp that confirms his star power.

Uncharted is in theaters now. It isn't a direct adaptation of the much-loved series of Naughty Dog games for Sony PlayStation, instead telling a new origin story for two-fisted tomb raider Nathan Drake. The film does borrow its opening from the games, however, launching straight into a slam-bang action scene that showcases Holland's easy charm and some improbably gravity-defying spectacle.

We first meet Drake as a young boy, sneaking into a museum to steal Ferdinand Magellan's map of the world. This junior heist goes wrong, and his beloved older brother goes on the lam from their orphanage, leaving Nathan to grow into a cocky bartender with a sideline in relieving women of their jewelry if they spurn his pushy flirting. Holland plays older Drake with his usual likable sincerity, which makes him fun to watch but utterly unconvincing as a calculating pickpocket. Still, he looks real enough to Mark Wahlberg, who shows up at the bar one night to recruit Drake for a heist that involves -- gasp! -- Magellan's map, untold lost golden riches and -- double gasp! -- Drake's missing brother. Next thing you know the duo are off round the world solving puzzles and uncovering ancient clues, chased by a purring millionaire and his vicious mercenaries.

If that sounds like lightweight fun, well, it kind of is. Holland's unpolished version of Drake spends most of his time getting his ass kicked, tumbling acrobatically into various scrapes and misadventures. The opening sequence is then topped by an utterly ridiculous final act, which offers some delightfully silly and infectiously entertaining blockbuster spectacle.

Tom Holland on the run in Uncharted.

In between, however, a lot will ride on how familiar you are with assorted other movies. The first meeting between Holland and Wahlberg is a bit Ocean's Eleven -- Wahlberg even shows up in a tux, bow tie hanging loose -- and the pair then proceed to reenact Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Like, the film literally re-creates the third Indiana Jones movie beat for beat. There's a missing family member, clues in a diary and a sequence sneaking into the catacombs of a European city. It's so brazen that I can't list any more of the similarities because it would count as spoilers.

The filmmakers don't make any attempt to hide this playful pilfering, giving Holland a cheeky twist on Indy's catchphrase. But then they keep mentioning Indiana Jones, and it starts to feel like they're protesting too much. By the way, this isn't even the first time a video game adaptation has ripped off that exact same movie: Remember the 2018 Tomb Raider film with Alicia Vikander ? That embezzled from Last Crusade so hard the villains even had the same name. It's annoyingly distracting, but maybe movie studios bank on gamers and younger viewers never having seen Indiana Jones.

By the end, Uncharted has shifted into Pirates of the Caribbean mode, but at least brings its own bonkers twist to the poop deck punch-ups. In this sequence and throughout the film. Holland's exuberance, decent VFX and mischievous stunt choreography keeps things watchable, which makes the inevitable post-credits scene and sequel tease more bearable. 

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• Tom Holland pitched a James Bond film but turned it into Uncharted instead

Arrayed against Holland are a mixed bag of baddies. Antonio Banderas can do the seductive villain thing in his sleep (and probably does), while Tati Gabrielle is instantly iconic as the ruthless killer in pursuit. The only thing sharper than her blades are her outfits, and even though the script seems determined to undermine her menace she's a welcome pop of energy in a film whose other characters are generally pretty bland. Wahlberg is OK as possibly untrustworthy mentor Sully, but it doesn't help the film that he and Holland are basically the same guy with the same biceps in the same tight T-shirts, the only difference between them a few years (and a lot of mileage).

Ultimately, with its piracy anchored by a star turn from Tom Holland, Uncharted is harmless fun. Holland may be an unconvincing kleptomaniac but he's adept at stealing scenes and hearts. The Uncharted movie may pilfer from assorted better films, but it's a victimless crime. 

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Summary Street-smart Nathan Drake (Tom Holland) is recruited by seasoned treasure hunter Victor “Sully” Sullivan (Mark Wahlberg) to recover a fortune amassed by Ferdinand Magellan and lost 500 years ago by the House of Moncada. What starts as a heist job for the duo becomes a globe-trotting, white-knuckle race to reach the prize before the ruthl ... Read More

Directed By : Ruben Fleischer

Written By : Rafe Judkins, Art Marcum, Matt Holloway, Jon Hanley Rosenberg

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Common Sense Media Review

Violence, language in too long game-based adventure.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Uncharted is a treasure hunt action-adventure movie that's based on the popular video game series featuring hero Nathan Drake (Tom Holland). Expect lots of largely bloodless action violence, much of it in the form of set pieces in which the main characters have to fight faceless,…

Why Age 12+?

Frequent action violence, with many set pieces in which the main characters must

Language and cursing includes "s--t," "son of a bitch," "hell," "bastards," "ass

Several scenes take place at bars, with characters ordering cocktails by name (m

Flirting. A male character looks suggestively at a woman's body as she walks awa

Characters are pursuing a trove of gold from a lost Spanish sailing foray; it's

Any Positive Content?

Central character Nate is intended to be seen as principled compared to his fell

The two top-billed stars are White men. Within the central quintet of tough, bra

Like in the game, the movie takes place in a world where people have few scruple

Violence & Scariness

Frequent action violence, with many set pieces in which the main characters must fight their way into or out of situations. Characters are often in mortal danger -- e.g., a scene in which they're trapped in an underground chamber filling with water. Two people are accidentally ejected from an aircraft and fall through the air while taking out villains. Deaths take place on-screen, including scenes in which throats are slit, characters are stabbed, and people fall off of planes and helicopters; blood is infrequent, and only one dead body is visible at length. Guns are used/brandished. Most of the opposition that main characters face is of the anonymous-henchperson type, with assailants seen quickly and dehumanized by shots that hide their faces.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Language and cursing includes "s--t," "son of a bitch," "hell," "bastards," "ass," "crap," "oh my God," and "Jesus" (as an exclamation). Characters frequently say something "sucks."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Several scenes take place at bars, with characters ordering cocktails by name (martini, negroni) and a bartender showily twirling bottles. In another scene, characters bond by drinking wine; by night's end, all look bleary and exhausted, and the room is littered with perhaps 10 bottles (for three people). A character holds, but does not smoke, a cigarette.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Flirting. A male character looks suggestively at a woman's body as she walks away; he's warned off by another character. References to characters being "together," and a scene in which characters are seen asleep in bed with the implication that they slept together. Female characters, particularly one antagonist, wear costumes that are impractically tight and bare; male characters are frequently seen shirtless.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Characters are pursuing a trove of gold from a lost Spanish sailing foray; it's said to be worth billions.

Positive Role Models

Central character Nate is intended to be seen as principled compared to his fellow adventurers, who don't hesitate to double-cross each other. And he is indeed loyal to those he considers his friends, but he also kills dozens in his pursuit of wealth and never seems to question it. Sully and Chloe are even less principled, betraying each other at almost every turn, as well as killing conveniently anonymous villains.

Diverse Representations

The two top-billed stars are White men. Within the central quintet of tough, brave characters, two are young women of color; everyone else is male. An antagonist is a man of unspecified Latino heritage who frequently speaks Spanish. Female characters are sexualized with bare, clingy costumes.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Positive Messages

Like in the game, the movie takes place in a world where people have few scruples and angle after ill-gotten gains (in this case, a missing treasure). Never considers what the Spanish treasure ship and the explorers who crewed it did to the land and people they plundered, nor whether finding and keeping the gold is worth the toll it ultimately takes.

Parents need to know that Uncharted is a treasure hunt action-adventure movie that's based on the popular video game series featuring hero Nathan Drake ( Tom Holland ). Expect lots of largely bloodless action violence, much of it in the form of set pieces in which the main characters have to fight faceless, dehumanized minions to get into or out of a location. Characters are frequently in mortal danger, including dangling from a flying plane and being trapped in an underground cavern that's filling with water. Guns are used, and people are killed by being hurled off of vehicles and falling great distances; one has his throat slit, and viewers see some blood and his dead body. Sexual content is limited to flirting, suggestive looks, and a scene that shows people in bed, implying that they slept together. While two of the main characters are women who are depicted as just as strong and brave as the men, they also wear clingy and sometimes unrealistically bare costumes that would be difficult to fight in, including spiked heels. Language includes "s--t," "son of a bitch," "hell," "oh my God," and more. Characters drink frequently; in one scene, three people share at least 10 bottles of wine and appear bleary and sloppy afterward. One character holds a cigarette and tries to light it but doesn't succeed. Drake is depicted as more heroic than the other characters because he doesn't betray his fellow adventurers, yet, like them, he pursues the lost Spanish gold at seemingly any cost, without concern for death and injury. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (21)
• Kids say (70)

Based on 21 parent reviews

More curse words than I thought

What's the story.

Based on the popular action-adventure video game series that started with Uncharted: Drake's Fortune , UNCHARTED focuses on the game's main protagonist: treasure hunter Nathan Drake ( Tom Holland ). Claiming that he and his long-lost brother, Sam (played as a teen by Rudy Pankow), are descended from renowned explorer Sir Francis Drake, Nathan is recruited by seasoned treasure hunter Victor "Sully" Sullivan ( Mark Wahlberg ) to search for the lost riches of Ferdinand Magellan, with the grudging accompaniment of their associate Chloe ( Sophia Ali ). But they aren't the only team on the hunt: Nathan and Sully's globe-trotting forays are closely followed by the ruthless and well-funded Moncada ( Antonio Banderas ) and his hired gun, Braddock (Tati Gabrielle).

Is It Any Good?

Beautiful to look at and crammed with heart-stopping adventure sequences set in picturesque foreign lands, this video game adaptation is thrilling, if overly long and morally iffy. What Uncharted mainly has going for it is adept adventure set piece directing and star Holland, who's an affable, even charming, lead. Nate is relatably anxious in the midst of mortal danger yet both game and good-humored, a fantastic foil for Wahlberg's Sully, who leans toward blank-faced derring-do. Holland's easygoing vibe makes viewers want to root for Nate on his quest in beautiful places and through immeasurable danger.

But that quest is more enjoyable if you switch off your brain before watching. It can't be denied that the only difference between Nate and Sully and the better-funded Moncada team that opposes them is that we're told the Moncada family is involved in criminal enterprises. Real bad stuff, the film tells us in a few throwaway lines, and then, poof!, Sully and Nate are seemingly cleared to kill as many people as they want in horrible ways in pursuit of treasure. That doesn't sound like a particularly heroic quest, but the film treats it as such (none of the characters questions whether this is a worthy goal, even when lives lost in the hunt mount into the dozens), which certainly detracts from the messages viewers might otherwise take away. Fans of the video games may not care: Scenes in which Nate and Sully leap through midair from planes and helicopters and ancient Spanish galleons are certainly exciting, and the Holland-and-Wahlberg buddy team is pleasant enough to anchor the movie if you don't think too hard about it.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about whether you need to have played any of the Uncharted games to appreciate this movie. Does knowing the game(s) help sharpen your enjoyment, or is the comparison distracting? Do video games typically make good fodder for movie adaptations? Why, or why not?

Many games have lots of deadly violence, with enemies killed in great numbers as the main character pursues their goal. How does the impact of that compare to what you see here?

How does Uncharted dehumanize the characters who die so that viewers don't consider their deaths important and it doesn't detract from the movie's flow? Is that OK?

How do you think viewers are meant to feel about Sully and Nate? About Chloe? Braddock? How do movies tell you who to root for and who to dislike? Consider that villains and heroes in this movie use the same ends to attain their means -- i.e., physical violence and trickery. With that in mind, what makes the heroes different from the villains?

Movie Details

• In theaters : February 18, 2022
• On DVD or streaming : May 10, 2022
• Cast : Tom Holland , Mark Wahlberg , Sophia Ali
• Director : Ruben Fleischer
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Middle Eastern/North African actors
• Studio : Columbia Pictures
• Genre : Action/Adventure
• Topics : Adventures
• Run time : 116 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : violence/action and language
• Last updated : July 11, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

What to watch next.

Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection

Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection

Jungle Cruise

Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark

National Treasure

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

The Mummy (1999)

The Librarian: Quest for the Spear

Excellent adventure movies for family fun, best action movies for kids, related topics.

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Uncharted’ on Netflix, a High-Flying Treasure Hunt That Turns Tom Holland Into Peter Parkour

Where to stream:.

• tom holland

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Now on Netflix, Uncharted currently stands as a Top 10 theatrical box office performer of 2022 , thanks in part to three things: One, star Tom Holland, AKA Spider-Man No. 3. Two, well-established source material (namely, a 40-plus-million-selling video game series about an intrepid young adventurer and treasure hunter). And three, escapism, probably? During more than a decade of development, the movie adaptation cycled through a half-dozen directors before landing on Zombieland and Venom guy Ruben Fleischer; Mark Wahlberg, Antonio Banderas, Sophia Ali and Tati Gabrielle round out the cast, who spent all kinds of time jumping and shooting and whatever in front of green screens for a movie that turns the guy best known as Peter Parker into Peter Parkour (which, frankly, isn’t much of a leap, apologies for the pun). Now, to borrow and decontextualize a Wahlberg line from this movie, “Let’s see what this shitcan can do!”

UNCHARTED : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Nathan Drake (Holland) awakens in freefall, god knows how many thousand feet above the Earth’s surface. His foot is caught in the strap of a string of cargo dangling from an airplane, and to make matters inconvenient, some bad guys are also shooting at him. This is not exactly an ideal way to emerge from naptime, but maybe that goes without saying. How did he get in this predicament? Well, this being one of those movies that starts with something exciting under the assumption that it’s one twitch of a mosquito’s proboscis away from audience boredom, we have to flash back to find out, then work our way back to this harrowing scene. How far do we have to flash back? To Nathan’s childhood, of course, duh, when he and his older brother Sam (Rudy Pankow) lived in an orphanage and were such history nerds, they broke into a museum to steal the first map of the whole world ever drawn. This got them in trouble, prompting Sam to run away and never be seen again.

Subtitle: NEW YORK, PRESENT DAY, which is a lie, because we know the actual present day is the day in which Nathan is falling out of an airplane, so this particular moment actually occurs at least a few days before the present day. (Sloppy-ass movies are slowly killing me, I tell you.) Nathan bartends at a fancy spot called Kitty Got Wet (yeesh), where he flips and tosses bottles like Cruise in Cocktail and pickpockets valuables from well-moneyed marks like Oliver Twist. Then he goes home to a teensy, crummy apartment where he works out without wearing a shirt. One day, Victor “Sully” Sullivan (Wahlberg) parks himself at Kitty Got Wet (yeesh) and reveals that he knows all about Nathan – his sheisty maneuvers, and his interest in the fabled lost gold of famed Spanish explorer Magellan. Sully knew Sam, working together to find the treasure. But Sam’s now lost or dead maybe; Nathan agrees to help Sully, hoping to find his beloved brother, and end up with a chunk of the legendary multi-billion-dollar booty, which may not exist because no one over the centuries has ever located it. But I’ve got a good feeling about this, because if Nathan and Sully weren’t smarter than everyone else who ever lived since the 1520s, there wouldn’t be a ridiculous movie about them – and this certainly doesn’t seem to be the type of story that ponders upon failure as a key contributor to personal psychological growth.

So off they go, Indiana Da Vinci Code Jonesing around Barcelona and the Philippines, following clues and finding artifacts, and picking up a third partner, Chloe Frazer (Ali), to help out with the wheres and whatfors. They’re not the only ones on the gold trail – nasty-nasty, old- old -money billionaire Santiago Moncada (Banderas), whose family privately bankrolled Magellan himself (I told you it was old money), wants the living shit out of it, and employs a cold-blooded, mean-as-hell damn killer, Braddock (Gabrielle), to do his dirty, dirty work. The “funny” thing here is, Sully and Chloe are such slippery backstabbing eels, each keeps telling Nathan not to trust the other, so he’s the earnest kid caught between two seasoned swindlers, relatively speaking anyway. Fists, bullets and banter fly, but ARE WE NOT ENTERTAINED?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: National Treasure meets Cocktail meets Raiders of the Lost Ark meets The Da Vinci Code meets Mission: Impossible meets The Goonies meets Cutthroat Island .

Performance Worth Watching: Holland shows more go-get-’em gusto here than in any of his non- Spider-Man outings. He has oodles of charisma and an eager capability to carry glossy, action-driven entertainment with flimsy characters and barely a sneeze in the direction of subtext. Is that a backhanded compliment? Yes – and no! It’s a long way of saying I’d love to see him take a creative step forward and continue the Mission: Impossible franchise after Tom Cruise retires.

Memorable Dialogue: The script here ranges from:

Chloe: Sully doesn’t have any friends. I should know – I’m one of them.

Nathan: What does that look like to you?

Chloe: A keyhole.

Sex and Skin: None. A hotel-room scene in which Holland is shirtless and Ali’s terrycloth robe hangs off her shoulder is frustratingly fruitless. So, TBFOOBMALADWTOTOTF: Too Busy Fussing Over Old Maps And Legends And Devising Ways To Outsmart The Others To F—.

Our Take: Uncharted is the type of movie that makes you want to keep pointing out that it’s the type of movie that does this cliched thing and that other cliched thing. Therefore, it’s the type of movie in which our protagonists can just rampage through an ancient historic church with a pair of bolt cutters and not only never see a single security guard, but barely get a scrunched-brow glance from an old nun. The type of movie in which booby traps were OBVIOUSLY designed to murder sluggish, untoned 16th-century softbodies, not ultra-quick keto-parkour-pilates-HIIT-whatever 21st-century hardbodies like Holland and Ali’s. The type of movie that will set a key sequence inside a popular ketchup-on-cardboard pizza chain (which one? By far the worst one!) and be utterly shameless about it. The type of movie that believes “Some kind of Roman antechamber” is not only a complete sentence, but a good, solid piece of dialogue. The type of movie with several is-she-outta-bullets/she’s- never -outta-bullets action sequences. The type of movie with great scads and wads of cheap crummy CGI visual effects, because they’re surely expensive even if they’re not particularly convincing. The type of movie that takes stuff from 20 other movies and makes bland porridge out of it.

It’s also the type of movie that isn’t half-bad as far as unapologetic timewasters go, a plausibility-be-damned, every-detail-is-a-plot-device story about an elite cadre of morally compromised, but ultimately likable big-dreamer action figures following twisty-turny dotted lines on old-timey maps to big piles of gold, spitting one-liners at each other and engaging in bloodless violence along the way. (How bloodless? So bloodless, when a character gets their throat cut, there’s, like two drips. Gotta keep that PG-13!) For sure, Fleischer knows his way around a snappy action sequence, but this is all pretty generic, high-flying/low-stakes middle-of-the-road stuff, slickly made and perfectly watchable and all the more boring for it.

Will you stream or skip the high-flying treasure hunt #UnchartedMovie on VOD? #SIOSI — Decider (@decider) April 30, 2022

Our Call: SKIP IT. Uncharted is kind of a parkour Pirates of the Caribbean , and if that sounds like it kind of sucks, you’d be right. Call me when there’s a capoeira Mission: Impossible .

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com .

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Why Fans Think Sony Has Canceled Uncharted 2 Movie Release Date Plans

Many fans are wondering whether Uncharted 2 movie has a release date, or if it has been delayed or canceled. This is because there had not been many concrete updates about the movie until recently. Released in February 2022, the first Uncharted movie featuring Tom Holland became a box office success despite garnering mixed reviews from critics, some of whom felt Holland and Mark Wahlberg’s portrayals of Nathan Drake and Victor Sullivan, respectively, were not accurate in comparison to their video game counterparts. However, it appears that fans have been eagerly awaiting information about the movie’s sequel.

So, is there a release date for the Uncharted 2 movie? Has Sony delayed or canceled Uncharted 2? Here is everything you need to know about it.

Does Tom Holland’s Uncharted 2 movie have a release date?

Uncharted 2 movie does not have a fixed release date or window.

However, as per Variety , Sony Pictures Entertainment confirmed that the film is in development. This confirmation came at the 2024 CineEurope event in June.

Has Sony delayed or canceled its Uncharted 2 release date plans?

Uncharted 2 has not been canceled and is currently in development. However, Sony has not confirmed whether their plans for Uncharted 2’s release date have been delayed.

During an interview with Screenrant in February 2024, Mark Wahlberg, who played Victor Sullivan in the first film, confirmed that the script for the sequel is ready. He then revealed that Sony told him, “Start growing your mustache,” as the film’s development is “gonna take a while.” Wahlberg then expressed interest in how the second film’s story would pan out.

Prior to this, in August 2023, producer Charles Roven also expressed intentions to make Uncharted 2. He told The Hollywood Reporter about how fans, especially those who had no knowledge of the Uncharted video games, liked the movie.

Not much is known about Uncharted 2’s plot details currently. However, based on the first film’s ending, it could likely see Nathan Drake and Victor Sullivan compete with a man named Roman and go on an adventure involving a Nazi map. Moreover, it could also see an imprisoned Sam somehow escape and try to find Nathan. This is because Sam was seen writing a note to Nathan, telling him to watch his back.

Uncharted is currently streaming on Hulu in the U.S.

The post Why Fans Think Sony Has Canceled Uncharted 2 Movie Release Date Plans appeared first on ComingSoon.net - Movie Trailers, TV & Streaming News, and More .

Why Fans Think Sony Has Canceled Uncharted 2 Movie Release Date Plans

By Abdul Azim Naushad

Many fans are wondering whether Uncharted 2 movie has a release date, or if it has been delayed or canceled. This is because there had not been many concrete updates about the movie until recently. Released in February 2022, the first Uncharted movie featuring Tom Holland became a box office success despite garnering mixed reviews from critics, some of whom felt Holland and Mark Wahlberg’s portrayals of Nathan Drake and Victor Sullivan, respectively, were not accurate in comparison to their video game counterparts. However, it appears that fans have been eagerly awaiting information about the movie’s sequel.

So, is there a release date for the Uncharted 2 movie? Has Sony delayed or canceled Uncharted 2? Here is everything you need to know about it.

Does Tom Holland’s Uncharted 2 movie have a release date?

Uncharted 2 movie does not have a fixed release date or window.

However, as per Variety , Sony Pictures Entertainment confirmed that the film is in development. This confirmation came at the 2024 CineEurope event in June.

Has Sony delayed or canceled its Uncharted 2 release date plans?

Uncharted 2 has not been canceled and is currently in development. However, Sony has not confirmed whether their plans for Uncharted 2’s release date have been delayed.

During an interview with Screenrant in February 2024, Mark Wahlberg, who played Victor Sullivan in the first film, confirmed that the script for the sequel is ready. He then revealed that Sony told him, “Start growing your mustache,” as the film’s development is “gonna take a while.” Wahlberg then expressed interest in how the second film’s story would pan out.

Prior to this, in August 2023, producer Charles Roven also expressed intentions to make Uncharted 2. He told The Hollywood Reporter about how fans, especially those who had no knowledge of the Uncharted video games, liked the movie.

Not much is known about Uncharted 2’s plot details currently. However, based on the first film’s ending, it could likely see Nathan Drake and Victor Sullivan compete with a man named Roman and go on an adventure involving a Nazi map. Moreover, it could also see an imprisoned Sam somehow escape and try to find Nathan. This is because Sam was seen writing a note to Nathan, telling him to watch his back.

Uncharted is currently streaming on Hulu in the U.S.

Abdul Naushad is a Contributing SEO Writer. He has previously written over a 100 articles for Sportskeeda. In his spare time, he likes to play video games, watch movies and aimlessly browse and watch different kinds of YouTube videos whether they be gaming reviews, movie explanations or even funny sketches and skits.

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