
“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.
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“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. Yet after the initial fireworks, you begin to see the design of the thing. “Uncharted” is essentially an action thriller about two lethally competing scavenger-hunt teams.ĭirected by Ruben Fleischer, who made “Venom” and the “Zombieland” films, the movie is less obviously video-game-ish than most entries in the genre. 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. There are two of the keys out there, and for them to work you need both. 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. “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. 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. Francis Boys Orphanage with his older brother, Sam (Rudy Pankow), who got kicked out, leaving the 10-year-old Nate to fend for himself. 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.”īack 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. “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. Can you say “Raiders of the Lost National Treasure of the Fast & Furious Caribbean”? (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.

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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.

But “ Uncharted,” based on the Naughty Dog game whose first installment dropped on PlayStation in 2007, is at least trying for something.
