Uncharted Movie Review: Too 'Gamey' for comfort

A still from `Uncharted`

Uncharted
Dir: Ruben Fleischer
Cast: Tom Holland, Mark Wahlberg, Antonio Banderas
Rating: 2.5/5

An award-winning video game franchise - the Naughty Dog games whose first installment dropped on PlayStation in 2007, (from the Sony games library) gets a movie makeover and it feels so mechanically engineered that attachment doesn't even begin to take root. The film version was in development for several years and the casting choices that changed as the project got parcelled off from one production team to another, don't make it an attractive proposition either way.

Fleischer plots together a mash-up of sequences from the games beginning with Uncharted 4 - a flashback showing rebellious older brother Sam making a promise to a very young Nate Drake… but as the story progresses we learn that Sam has all but disappeared. The now Young Adult Nate (Tom Holland), working as a bartender and Pick-pocket hustler on the side, gets recruited by Sully( Mark Wahlberg) to team up and uncover the lost treasure of Magellan. But there's more than one party interested in the prized loot - including Santiago (Antonio Banderas) Moncada, aided by his very own slippery army of thieves. Incidentally, the Moncada family is supposed to have funded the Magellan mission, the Spanish Inquisition and the Franco regime.

The action landscape here is largely populated by ‘Spider-man' like antics - so Holland has little to do other than channel his Spider-man stunts. So we see him slip, slide, jump, spring, take aerial leaps of fancy off-flying planes, bounce off walls, etc. with efficiency and grace. Holland's Nate feels like he hasn't gotten over his Peter Parker Spider-Man shtick. Both Holland and Wahlberg as Victor Sullivan aka Sully play on like one-dimensional stereotypes. Their motivations are avarice and neither of them garners empathy along the way. Sophie Ali as Chloe Frazer, Sully's long-time treasure hunting associate and Tati Gabrielle as Braddock, Moncado's blade-wielding henchwoman are the ones who lend some style and charisma to this rather prissy exercise at swashbuckling adventure.

The treasure hunting narrative is ruled by green screen special effects but the sense of fun is sorely missing. The world-building and character specifics are rather thin and the narrative, though slick and fast-paced, doesn't really capture your imagination as it should have. There's nothing new in terms of action or treatment here. A rather vapid series of set-pieces embellished with a high-velocity airplane stunt involving airborne 16th-century sailing ships and a Parkour-like chase sequence fails to make this game-to-cinema event memorable enough!