It’s nice to see Tom Holland follow in the footsteps of his fellow Marvel star Chris Hemsworth at being incapable of headlining a movie outside of his superhero franchise. But on some level, I respect him for trying. At the very least movies like The Devil All the Time and Cherry show that he wants to stretch himself, to move away from the dorky teenage persona he’s accidentally made his brand. As much as he may publicly decry the filmmakers who criticize Marvel, he clearly wants to be in the kinds of movies they make.
Uncharted is the lateral move in that, perhaps the least interesting choice of his career thus far; the dullest, safest bet he could make on another blockbuster franchise property, and yet he still is woefully out of his depths. It shows that he needs a new agent, especially for after that Spider-Man well runs dry.
Uncharted is of course the latest Hollywood attempt to adapt a video game to the big screen -and there’s certainly potential in it, an adventure game franchise bent around travelling the world treasure hunting. But like most video games that could make for interesting movies, it’s unfortunately in the hands of people bent on making the least interesting movies. It’s directed by Ruben Fleischer, of Zombieland and Venom fame, one of Sony’s reliable in-house figures, who directs the movie very workman-like and without much an eye for detail or unique energy. However it is the script though, between story and screenplay credited to five people, that hurts the movie more than mediocre direction ever could.
There is nothing remotely original or fun about the story here, a mash-up in style and scope of every big budget adventure vehicle from The Mummy to Pirates of the Caribbean to National Treasure. Its’ characters are paper-thin and stunningly non-charismatic as the writers attempt to ape specifically the dialogue rhythm of Holland’s Marvel movies. But if one of the goals is to sell Holland as a grown-up action star now, its’ counter-intuitive to saddle him with such adolescent speech and mannerisms. He still comes off all throughout as a kid, making juvenile jokes about his partner’s age or a Scotsman’s accent, reacting with Whedon-esque smarm to serious situations, and emphasizing a condescendingly Gen-Z personality that materializes in such things as impulsively getting a cat for someone just because they seem lonely. In fairness, the writing isn’t there for his co-stars much either, who do have to perform to that level as well a lot of the time. He’s also not the only person to be catered to by the script, which seems just as structured around appeasing his biggest co-star.
For a long time Mark Wahlberg was expected to play the lead character, Nathan Drake. He’d been attached to an early version since 2010, but a long and arduous development process, full of false starts, rewrites, and cancellations seemingly aged him out of the role (it also lost director Travis Knight who surely would have turned in something better!). I bring this up becomes it seems like the movie is actively compensating Wahlberg for re-casting Nathan Drake by essentially letting him still be Nathan Drake for all intents and purposes. His Victor “Sully” is de-facto the co-lead of the film, with much more screen-time than the average old mentor character -as Wahlberg’s determined to prove he can be a tentpole movie star at fifty. Even with a series of self-effacing jokes about his being older, the movie really wants you to believe he isn’t -right down to giving him some major action scenes and an old romantic flame working as one of the chief antagonists who is half his age.
She’s played by Tati Gabrielle, one of the few performers to leave an impression -her boss is Antonio Banderas, and together they’re just compelling enough that you wish the bad guys would win. Certainly, Nate and Sully don’t seem to have much of a higher threshold of integrity -they’re not Indiana Jones with that “belongs in a museum” philosophy. They just seem like two guys who like treasure hunting. Nate is given a trite backstory framing his passion around a bond with his older brother, but it’s so hyper-specific as to be unbelievable. Motivation is vague, organization is minimal, much of the plot exists to facilitate set-pieces or pretty locales rendered dull through a mediocre palette (Sony wasted Chung Chung-hoon’s talents to shoot this film). The two major set-pieces emphasized in the advertising are probably the most video game-looking parts of the film, because just about every component to them is a digital creation. A cargo plane scuffle that the film strangely chooses to open on before flashing back is modestly inventive in design but fairly bland in execution -and ludicrously weightless both in stakes and in how nothing in the scene has any tangibility (at one point CGI Nate hops boxes back to the cargo hold as though he were Mario all of a sudden).The climax sequence involves massive carriers flying a pair of sixteenth century ships through a Philippine archipelago, which is more novel, but again any excitement is tempered by how cleanly and artificially it is constructed.
And in these scenes in particular Holland seems lost, completely at the whims of whatever is going on around him, making no choices of his own. Throughout the film he doesn’t manage a lot better, and the script is certainly culpable, but a part of it is just how ill-suited he is for this role, as much as they try to force a Nathan Drake piece into a Tom Holland slot. At this time, Holland still just can’t escape looking like a dorky teenager and the part requires somebody who radiates that kind of rugged adult masculinity so popular in games and films of this genre. Holland and the movie are going for a kind of happy medium, but all that does is highlight the fundamental disconnect. And in playing to those sensibilities of his Spider-Man performance, Holland corners himself artistically -nothing out of his mouth is authentic or believable, in fact it’s extremely calculated. Holland is no stranger by now to miscasting, but this one especially stands out for being so misguided and gutless -and more than in any other project he’s headlined, it brings down the whole movie.
The fact that this was the end result of a more than a decade long attempt to make a big-screen version of Uncharted is pretty pathetic. Spielberg, this is not -he literally made the better version of it eleven years ago with The Adventures of Tintin. That and a dozen other adventure movies cast the shadow that Uncharted is trying to emulate and fails at miserably. A dull, uninspired dreck of modern Hollywood brand-building -it’s not even as good as the fourth Indiana Jones.
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