by Jordan Costolo ‘25

The Uncharted video games are a cinematic experience in and of themselves, seamlessly switching between cutscenes and gameplay. If there were a game that would work as a movie, it would be this one. Unfortunately, the people at Sony dropped the ball with adapting the series.

The premise of the film centers around long-time treasure hunter, Victor ‘Sully’ Sullivan (Mark Whalberg), recruiting the street smart and charismatic aspiring treasure hunter Nathan Drake (Tom Holland) to find the 500 year old treasure hoard of Ferdinand Magellan. What starts as a small con turns into a race across the world for billions in pirate gold against Santiago Moncada (Antonio Banderas), the so-called “rightful owner” of the fortune . For fans of the games, this plot is a meld of all 4 games in the series but mostly takes material from the final one. There’s a lot of exposition for the characters, which may be a bit grueling for fans of the games but necessary for new viewers of the series.

When hearing this summary of the story, it sounds like an average Indiana Jones-esque story, which admittedly, is what the Uncharted games are. But what makes the video games something special is the characters and their relationships, which in the movie, is nothing noteworthy. The cast tries their best to fit their roles, but an actor like Holland does not fit the role of gruff and charismatic Nathan Drake, although he does try to persuade the audience with the numerous times he takes off his shirt. That’s one of the biggest down sides with this movie: the actors have good chemistry and work well together, but the two main costars don’t fit their roles. It doesn’t help that the original selection long ago of the actor to play  Nathan Drake was Wallberg, who aged out of the role. The production of the Uncharted film has been hot potato-ed around to different directors and actors, for about 20 years when the first game came out.

For this movie being in production for so long, someone would think that it would be a fully finalized and finished product, but sadly this is not the case. The movie ends abruptly, with a climax and resolution but no falling action, like it was cut short. The hand to hand combat is enjoyable, but almost all of those scenes cut away in the middle of a fight, undermining any sense of suspense or climax to the action. 

 There are good parts that Uncharted captures from the games. The stunts in this movie are very fun to watch because of the pacing, which makes it maybe the most enjoyable part of the movie. Although many aspects of this movie are lackluster, there is never a dull moment in the movie. The extensive amount of action in each scene keeps the film fun, even if the rest of the movie is not the greatest. Uncharted may be a mediocre movie, but the non-stop action will keep the audience’ attention.

Grade: C+