movie review unchartered

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, chaz's journal, great movies, contributors.

Now streaming on:

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.

Now playing

Lady in the Lake

Kaiya shunyata.

Glenn Kenny

National Anthem

Sheila o'malley.

Harold and the Purple Crayon

Peter sobczynski.

Robert Daniels

Film credits.

Uncharted (2022)

Rated PG-13 for violence/action and language.

116 minutes

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

• Ruben Fleischer

Writer (story)

• Rafe Judkins
• Jon Hanley Rosenberg
• Mark D. Walker
• Matt Holloway

Cinematographer

• Chung-hoon Chung
• Chris Lebenzon
• Richard Pearson
• Ramin Djawadi

Latest blog posts

In Memoriam: Alain Delon

Conversation Piece: Phil Donahue (1935-2024)

​Subjective Reality: Larry Fessenden on Crumb Catcher, Blackout, and Glass Eye Pix

Book Excerpt: A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda by Carrie Rickey

Common Sense Media

Movie & TV reviews for parents

• For Parents
• For Educators
• Our Work and Impact

Or browse by category:

• Movie Reviews
• Best Movie Lists
• Best Movies on Netflix, Disney+, and More

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

• Best TV Lists
• Best TV Shows on Netflix, Disney+, and More
• Common Sense Selections for TV
• Video Reviews of TV Shows

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

• Book Reviews
• Best Book Lists
• Common Sense Selections for Books

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

• Game Reviews
• Best Game Lists

Common Sense Selections for Games

• Video Reviews of Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

• Podcast Reviews
• Best Podcast Lists

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

• App Reviews
• Best App Lists

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

• YouTube Channel Reviews
• YouTube Kids Channels by Topic

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

YouTube Kids Channels for Gamers

• Preschoolers (2-4)
• Little Kids (5-7)
• Big Kids (8-9)
• Pre-Teens (10-12)
• Teens (13+)
• Screen Time
• Social Media
• Online Safety
• Identity and Community

How to Help Kids Build Character Strengths with Quality Media

• Family Tech Planners
• Digital Skills
• All Articles
• Latino Culture
• Black Voices
• Asian Stories
• Native Narratives
• LGBTQ+ Pride
• Best of Diverse Representation List

Multicultural Books

YouTube Channels with Diverse Representations

Podcasts with Diverse Characters and Stories

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 21 Reviews
• Kids Say 70 Reviews

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 .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

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.

Want suggestions based on your streaming services? Get personalized recommendations

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

Advertisement

Supported by

‘Uncharted’ Review: Steal, Fight, Repeat

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

• Share full article

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.”

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

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

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

More like this

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

• caidencleveland
• Feb 26, 2022
• How long is Uncharted? Powered by Alexa
• February 18, 2022 (United States)
• United States
• Official Facebook
• Official Instagram
• Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
• 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

Related news

Contribute to this page.

• IMDb Answers: Help fill gaps in our data
• Learn more about contributing

More to explore

Recently viewed.

‘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

• ‘Blink Twice’ Review: Zoë Kravitz Proves She’s a Total Filmmaker in a #MeToo-Meets-‘Midsommar’ Thriller Starring a Sinister Channing Tatum 2 days ago
• Will the People Who Say They Love Cinema the Most Come Back to the Movies? 4 days ago
• ‘The Deliverance’ Review: Lee Daniels Directs a Demonic-Possession Movie in Which the Real Demons Are Personal (and Flamboyant) 5 days ago

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.

Related Stories

Reality check: summer hot streak won’t dig u.s. box office out of deep hole in 2024, 'monkey man' soundtrack gets vinyl release from waxwork records.

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.

More from Variety

Mark hamill joins ‘the spongebob movie: search for squarepants’ as the flying dutchman, vfx working conditions need to change, but current unionization option may not be the answer, keke palmer’s mother says dan schneider’s sets were ‘very weird’ and ‘cultish’: ‘the parents were secretive’ and ‘took themselves way too seriously’, ‘tales of the teenage mutant ninja turtles’ hits streaming: how to watch the new animated series online, ai content licensing deals with publishers: complete updated index, nickelodeon, paramount+ head of global kids and family marketing sabrina caluori exits, more from our brands, every state’s song at the dnc roll call to nominate harris, the average mclaren supercar sells for $312,000—but the company wants that number to be higher, peacock adds 2.8 million subs during first week of paris olympics, the best loofahs and body scrubbers, according to dermatologists, lana parrilla joins usa’s rainmaker adaptation as ‘bruiser’ stone.

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter

site categories

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

• Share on Facebook
• Share to Flipboard
• Send an Email
• Show additional share options
• Share on LinkedIn
• Share on Pinterest
• Share on Reddit
• Share on Tumblr
• Share on Whats App
• Print the Article
• Post a Comment

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.

Related Stories

'the union' review: mark wahlberg and halle berry star in a standard netflix action flick that gets the job done, mark wahlberg on leaving l.a. for las vegas and whether he would come back: "i always miss it".

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

THR Newsletters

Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Bill skarsgard on his “bleak state of mind” while filming ‘the crow’: “i like to be consumed by it”, santa barbara film fest to host retrospective of ‘dune’ helmer denis villeneuve’s work, ‘greedy people’ review: joseph gordon-levitt’s coens-lite thriller strains for dark laughs, ‘emilia pérez’ to receive ensemble award at mill valley film festival (exclusive), venice: ‘don’t cry, butterfly’ trailer explores a vietnamese woman’s evolving response to adultery, ‘it ends with us’ franchise might end with blake lively-justin baldoni feud.

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

• About Rotten Tomatoes®
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening this week
• Top box office
• Coming soon to theaters
• Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

• Fandango at Home
• Prime Video
• Most Popular Streaming Movies
• Certified Fresh Movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• 81% Alien: Romulus Link to Alien: Romulus
• 88% Between the Temples Link to Between the Temples
• 100% Daughters Link to Daughters

New TV Tonight

• 93% Chimp Crazy: Season 1
• 100% Pachinko: Season 2
• -- That '90s Show: Season 3
• -- OceanXplorers: Season 1
• -- Classified: Season 1
• -- Reasonable Doubt: Season 2
• -- The Anonymous: Season 1
• -- Face to Face With Scott Peterson: Season 1
• -- Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy War: Season 1

Most Popular TV on RT

• 78% Star Wars: The Acolyte: Season 1
• 92% Bad Monkey: Season 1
• 100% Dark Winds: Season 2
• 96% Industry: Season 3
• 54% The Umbrella Academy: Season 4
• 86% Average Joe: Season 1
• 100% Supacell: Season 1
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV
• TV & Streaming News

Certified fresh pick

• 92% Bad Monkey: Season 1 Link to Bad Monkey: Season 1
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

All Quentin Tarantino Movies Ranked

Andrew Garfield Movies and Series Ranked by Tomatometer

What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming

Awards Tour

Verified Hot: Honoring The Films with the Highest Verified Audience Scores

Introducing the Verified Hot Audience Badge

• Trending on RT
• Verified Hot Movies
• Re-Release Calendar
• Popular TV Shows
• Renewed and Cancelled TV

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

‘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.

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.

Related Articles

Movies | 17 06 2024

Movies | 08 02 2022

Movies | 07 02 2022

Movies | 23 12 2021

Movies | 21 10 2021

• Login / Sign Up

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.

• Entertainment

Most Popular

• The big games, reveals, and trailers from Gamescom Opening Night Live 2024
• Shadow the Hedgehog is Venom now
• PUBG dev's new life sim looks like The Sims with a dash of GTA
• All-New Venom kicks off a high-stakes Marvel mystery later this year
• Grab your friends and tell them about this Adventure Time Bundle

Patch Notes

The best of Polygon in your inbox, every Friday.

This is the title for the native ad

More in Reviews

The Latest ⚡️

Uncharted Movie Review

Did you enjoy this video, in this video.

Where to Watch

More From Forbes

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

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Linkedin

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.

Best Travel Insurance Companies

Best covid-19 travel insurance plans.

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 .

• Editorial Standards
• Reprints & Permissions

Things you buy through our links may earn  Vox Media  a commission.

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.

More Movie Reviews

• When You’re Too Obsessed With Channing Tatum to Eat the Rich
• You Won’t Forget the Faces of Daughters
• Alien: Romulus Gets the Job Done, But at What Cost?
• movie review
• mark wahlberg
• tom holland
• antonio banderas
• ruben fleischer

Most Viewed Stories

• Cinematrix No. 148: August 21, 2024
• Phil Collins Is Alive and Thriving
• What Happened With Kendall and Nicole From Love Island USA ?
• That Feeling You Recognize? Obamacore.
• 7 AMC TV Gems That You Can Now Enjoy on Netflix
• 100 Pieces of Pop Culture That Defined Obamacore
• The Bachelorette Recap: The Most Boring Hometowns in Recent Memory

Editor’s Picks

Most Popular

What is your email.

This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive email correspondence from us.

Sign In To Continue Reading

Create your free account.

Password must be at least 8 characters and contain:

• Lower case letters (a-z)
• Upper case letters (A-Z)
• Numbers (0-9)
• Special Characters (!@#$%^&*)

As part of your account, you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York , which you can opt out of anytime.

• Entertainment

'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. 

• What's new to stream for February 2022
• 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. 

New Movies Coming in 2023 From Marvel, Netflix, DC and More

2023's Best TV and Streaming Shows You Can't Miss on Netflix, HBO, Disney Plus and More

• Latest Latest
• The West The West
• Sports Sports
• Opinion Opinion
• Magazine Magazine

‘Uncharted’ review: If you don’t take it seriously, it’s one of most exciting movies in years

‘uncharted’ brings tom holland and mark wahlberg together for a fun adventure story.

By Herb Scribner

If you like realistic movies, “Uncharted” isn’t for you. But if you like popcorn blockbusters and Tom Holland, then it may be the perfect movie for you.

• “Uncharted” — based on the video game series — tells the story of Nathan Drake, a street-smart bartender who joins hunter Victory “Sully” Sullivan on an adventure to discover the treasure hidden by Ferdinand Magellan.
• Of course, the adventure doesn’t go smoothly as other parties seek out the treasure, too.
• “Uncharted” may seem like a basic adventure story. But there’s definitely more than meets the eye for this adventure story.

The good bits: “Uncharted” leans into the ridiculousness that a video game movie will provide. The physics of the real world matter. Like professional wrestling, these characters take bump after bump and still get up.

• So you have to suspend your disbelief for this movie. And if you do, it’s a thrilling treasure hunt story wrapped in puzzles.
• It doesn’t quite reach the charm and excitement of “National Treasure,” but it’s better than “Red Notice,” the recent treasure hunt story with Gal Gadot, Dwayne Johnson and Ryan Reynolds.
• “Uncharted” brings you on a magical adventure that doesn’t slow down. It dabbles in colonial world history that could be boring. But the writing is good enough that you stay engaged throughout the entire story.
• Few of the puzzles are easy to solve. Viewers won’t pinpoint the next move for the characters, making the audience have to do some extra bit of thinking on their own.

The cast: Tom Holland does Tom Holland things, so if you’ve enjoyed his schtick in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you’ll enjoy this movie.

• Mark Wahlberg is another Mark Wahlberg character — a tough guy with a heart. It balances well with Holland’s goofy, clumsy nature.
• Sophia Ali, who plays Chloe, does a great job jumping between trustworthy and untrustworthy, which defines a lot of the film.
• Tati Gabrielle is an almost flawless villain. You don’t trust her from her first appearance and you genuinely dislike everything she does to disrupt our heroes.

The knocks: Naturally, a movie will have its flaws. Some of the jokes didn’t land as well as they could have. Holland and Wahlberg delivered the lines well, but the dialogue felt clunky and forced. So it wasn’t as funny as it could be.

• The trailer also spoiled some of the movie’s coolest moments. So if you haven’t watched the trailer, don’t do it now. It’s better to walk into that movie without seeing some of the bigger trailer shots since that spoils the most fun part of the movie.
• There’s one sequence in particular — it takes place in Barcelona — that felt overly long. Sure, the characters had to solve puzzle after puzzle. But it felt like we spent too much time in Barcelona compared to how we spent time in the third act.

Yes, but: I didn’t play the “Uncharted” video game, so I won’t have a good comparison between the movie and video game. From what other critics told me, the movie did not match the same direction as the video game. I cannot speak authoritatively on that subject, though.

The bottom line: “Uncharted” is a fun, popcorn blockbuster flick that, if you suspend all thinkings of physics, is fun for everyone. I definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a good time and a wild ride. It serves as a pretty fun summer escape in the middle of winter.

• Entertainment /
• Movie Review

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.

Share this story

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.

The Acolyte has been canceled

The ftc’s noncompete agreements ban has been struck down, sonos ceo says the old app can’t be rereleased, civilization 7 lets you mix and match history — and it’s a blast, microsoft teams’ new single app for personal and work is now available.

More from Entertainment

The Nintendo Switch 2 will now reportedly arrive in 2025 instead of 2024

The best Presidents Day deals you can already get

Vudu’s name is changing to ‘Fandango at Home’

Tommy Tallarico’s never-actually-featured-on-MTV-Cribs house is for sale

‘Uncharted’ review: Tom Holland’s off-the-map adventure loses the plot

Not the video game adaptation console fans were hoping for

I f you’ve seen the trailers for this action-adventure movie based on a popular video game franchise, you’ll know it’s not afraid to go big. There are spectacular scenes showing two old-timey pirate ships being towed through mid-air by helicopters – a visual so outlandish it almost belongs in a boat-based Fast and Furious spin-off. It’s surely not much of a spoiler to say these flying pirate ships form part of Uncharted ‘s enjoyably daft climax, which almost justifies its existence as a passable popcorn flick. But sadly, the journey to get there is filled with a lot of plodding nonsense.

The film adaptation of Uncharted was stuck in development hell for so long that Mark Wahlberg was originally due to play the protagonist: Nathan ‘Nate’ Drake, a young fortune hunter who claims to be a descendant of legendary explorer Sir Francis Drake. More than a decade later, he’s aged out of the role and instead portrays Nate’s sketchy mentor, Victor ‘Sully’ Sullivan. This allows Tom Holland, who’s also credited as an executive producer here, to play Nate with his usual earnest charm and limber physicality. At the start of the movie, we see him falling through mid-air, and he’ll do more of this as the story progresses.

Uncharted then darts back in time, showing us Nate working as a New York bartender who skilfully nicks a bracelet from an unsuspecting customer, and Sully watching on from a corner table. Nate is initially wary of the observant stranger, but Sully soon recruits him as his partner on an expedition to track down “the biggest treasure that’s never been found”: lost gold once plundered by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan . Sully’s motives are financial, but for Nate the expedition is personal because he believes it will reunite him with older brother Sam, who left to do some exploring of his own many years earlier. We’re told that since then he’s only heard from Sam by postcard, which is neither the first nor last time this film requires a hefty suspension of disbelief.

Director Ruben Fleischer ( Zombieland , Venom ) keeps things moving briskly enough as Nate and Sully head to Barcelona, whey they team up with fellow fortune hunter Chloe Frazer (Sophia Ali) and clock their main rival for Magellan’s gold: Moncada, a two-dimensional billionaire with daddy issues played flatly by Antonio Banderas. Actually, it’s pretty much a facsimile of his villainous performance in last year’s The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard . A subterranean treasure hunt through the historic Spanish city offers some Indiana Jones-style fun, but Uncharted doesn’t really spark into life until that ludicrous climax.

The main problem is that none of these characters are ever fleshed out enough to make you invest in them – Moncada’s ass-kicking mercenary Braddock (Tati Gabrielle) is particularly thinly written – or forget the film’s fundamentally ridiculous premise. Holland and Wahlberg gamely try to strike up some banter-y chemistry, but the script saddles them with lame running jokes about Nate chewing gum (wild!) and Sully having too many apps on his phone open. Post-credit scenes signpost with zero subtlety that Uncharted wants to be a franchise. But on this evidence, the journey to box office gold is no foregone conclusion.

• Director: Ruben Fleischer
• Starring: Tom Holland, Mark Wahlberg, Antonio Banderas
• Release date: February 11

More Stories

‘joker 3’ not happening, says director todd phillips, alicia silverstone shares health update after eating poisonous berry, taylor swift shares behind-the-scenes look at ‘eras’ tour with ‘i can do it with a broken heart’ video, watch florence welch and jack antonoff join taylor swift on stage at wembley stadium, matthew perry was found unconscious by assistant at least twice before his death, watch ac/dc play last scheduled gig of 2024 comeback tour to 82,000 fans, you may also like.

• Action/Adventure
• Children's/Family
• Documentary/Reality
• Amazon Prime Video

More From Decider

New Shows & Movies To Watch This Weekend: Prime Video's 'Jackpot!' +...

Peacock Has Removed Raygun and the Entire Olympics Breaking Competition...

'WWHL': Bowen Yang Says One Terrible 'SNL' Host Once Made "Multiple Cast...

Peacock's Gary Coleman Doc Questions The Late Child Actor's "Suspicious"...

11 Best New Movies on Netflix: August 2024's Freshest Films to Watch

'Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles' Star Josh Flagg Gives Update On His...

Kora's Scars in the 'Rebel Moon: Director's Cut' Sex Scenes Were Sofia...

11 Best New Shows on Netflix: August 2024's Top Upcoming Series to Watch

Share this:.

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)
• Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
• Click to copy URL

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

Selenis Leyva Says She "Didn't Suspect Anything" Romantic Between 'Spider-Man: Homecoming' Co-Stars Zendaya And Tom Holland: "They Kept It Under Wraps"

'madame web's dakota johnson can't name tom holland's three 'spider-man' films, but serves up solid marvel-harry potter crossover: "'harry, spider-man and the goblet of man'", tom hollander admits he's often mistaken for tom holland: "i'm introduced to somebody's very, very excited, then confused, then disappointed children", 'the crowded room' episode 7 is cathartic for all the wrong reasons.

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 .

Stream  Uncharted

• Prime Video
• Stream It Or Skip It

Peacock Has Removed Raygun and the Entire Olympics Breaking Competition Off The Platform

'Inside Out 2' Comes to Digital, But When Will 'Inside Out 2' Be Streaming on Disney+?

Is The First 'Monday Night Football' Game On Tonight? How To Watch NFL Games On Monday Nights This Season

What Time Is 'The Bachelorette' On Tonight? How To Watch Season 21, Episode 7 (Hometown Week) Live On ABC And Hulu

Mark Consuelos Recalls Being Served A "Massive" Soft Serve After Being Recognized From 'Riverdale' On 'Live': "I Used To Ask For A Small"

'The Bachelorette' Season 21, Episode 7 Recap: Who Went Home After Hometown Dates?

UK Edition Change

• UK Politics
• News Videos
• Paris 2024 Olympics
• Rugby Union
• Sport Videos
• John Rentoul
• Mary Dejevsky
• Andrew Grice
• Sean O’Grady
• Photography
• Theatre & Dance
• Culture Videos
• Fitness & Wellbeing
• Food & Drink
• Health & Families
• Royal Family
• Electric Vehicles
• Car Insurance Deals
• Lifestyle Videos
• UK Hotel Reviews
• News & Advice
• Simon Calder
• Australia & New Zealand
• South America
• C. America & Caribbean
• Middle East
• Politics Explained
• News Analysis
• Today’s Edition
• Home & Garden
• Broadband deals
• Fashion & Beauty
• Travel & Outdoors
• Sports & Fitness
• Climate 100
• Sustainable Living
• Climate Videos
• Solar Panels
• Behind The Headlines
• On The Ground
• Decomplicated
• You Ask The Questions
• Binge Watch
• Travel Smart
• Watch on your TV
• Crosswords & Puzzles
• Most Commented
• Newsletters
• Ask Me Anything
• Virtual Events
• Wine Offers

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in Please refresh your browser to be logged in

The Union: Netflix movie sets regrettable review milestone for Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry

Action-comedy has soared to no 1 on netflix, article bookmarked.

Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse Loughrey

Get our the life cinematic email for free, thanks for signing up to the the life cinematic email.

Netflix ’s latest action-comedy The Union has risen to No 1 on the streaming giant – but it’s not all good news for the movie’s stars.

Since its release on Friday (16 August), the film has shot up to the top spot on Netflix in the UK, ahead of 1998’s US Mashals and 2021’s Kingsman: The Secret Service .

The Union stars Mark Wahlberg as Mike, a construction worker in New Jersey, who finds himself thrust into the world of super spies when his high school sweetheart, Roxanne (played by Halle Berry ), enlists his help on a high-stakes US intelligence mission.

The film has received mostly negative reviews from viewers, with only a minority applauding the “fun” plot and “great chemistry” between Wahlberg, 53, and Berry, 58.

Most subscribers have deemed The Union “generic” and “cheesy”.  “Movies should make us feel something, so full marks to The Union on Netflix for generating so much boredom and depression,” wrote one person on X/Twitter.

Another added: “I mean my expectations were low, as in I had no expectations But Netflix still managed to disappoint with this The Union movie.”

This sentiment is reflected in the film’s unfavourable rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes , where it has a 28 per cent audience score based on more than 100 reviews.

The paltry score marks a low point for both Wahlberg and Berry, who have not starred in a film with such a low audience rating in over 10 years.

According to Rotten Tomatoes , of the 10 films that Berry has starred in since 2014, The Union is the lowest rated according to audiences.

Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 days

New subscribers only. £8.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled

Second lowest is Kings , which was released in 2017, and has 31 per cent. 2017 was not a good year for Berry, with Kidnap , coming third lowest with 50 per cent.

Her highest rated audience score in the last decade came courtesy of X-Men: Days of Future Past in 2014, followed by 2019’s John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum and 2022’s Sidney with 86 per cent and 85 per cent, respectively.

It is a similarly unfortunate story for Wahlberg , whose last 10 years in film have not seen him dip as low as 28 per cent in audience ratings until now.

The actor has his fair share of low scores, however, with 2015’s Mojave coming in at 30 per cent, 2022’s Me Time at 32 per cent, 2021’s Infinite at 34 per cent, and the 2017 Transformers sequel The Last Knight at 43 per cent.

On the top end for Wahlberg are Arthur the King , which came out this year and has 97 per cent, 2022’s Father Stu with 95 per cent and Uncharted with 90 per cent.

Its terrible audience rating, however, has not stopped The Union from soaring to No 1 on Netflix in the UK – and there has already been talk of a sequel.

In an interview with Variety , Wahlberg, Berry, and director Julian Farino said that the creative team had made decision not to have the characters kiss in an effort to build anticipation for a potential sequel. They even teased that Netflix had perhaps suggested a multi-movie plan for the franchise.

On the press tour for the film, Berry has been asked about her 2004 critical flop Catwoman , with the actor giving a brief NSFW defence against critics who said it “sucked balls” at the time .

The Union is out on Netflix now.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Subscribe to Independent Premium to bookmark this article

Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today.

New to The Independent?

Or if you would prefer:

Hi {{indy.fullName}}

• My Independent Premium
• Account details
• Help centre

• Vote: Reader’s Choice
• Meta Quest 4
• Google Pixel 9
• Google Pixel 8a
• Apple Vision Pro 2
• Nintendo Switch 2
• Samsung Galaxy Ring
• Yellowstone Season 6
• Recall an Email in Outlook
• Stranger Things Season 5

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is more than Xbox’s Uncharted

Creating an Indiana Jones video game is a daunting task. It’s not just that you have to honor an iconic film franchise that fans are very protective of; you also need to make it stand out from Uncharted, a beloved series that is already ostensibly a thinly veiled Indiana Jones adaptation. It’s a challenge, but one that MachineGames seems to have cracked with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle .

Ahead of its latest trailer reveal at Gamescom Opening Night Live, I got a deeper look into the upcoming action-adventure game. While previous looks have focused on story, the latest presentation gives a much deeper look into its combat, exploration, and more. While there are some parallels to Uncharted, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle  feels more indebted to Wolfenstein , Hitman , and even The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay . That makes it feel much more like an Indiana Jones game than a boilerplate tomb-raiding adventure.

Tools of the trade

Set after Raiders of the Lost Ark , The Great Circle begins at Marshall College, where someone steals a priceless relic. Jones teams up with photojournalist Gina to recover it, only to discover that there’s a wider conspiracy at play that goes through Nazi territory. With the help of some companions, they set out on a globe-trotting adventure that involves the villainous Emmerich Voss and the titular Great Circle, a ring that connects the world’s biggest landmarks (an idea that came from producer Todd Howard).

There’s some familiar gameplay here. I saw Jones shimmy up walls and do some platforming through tombs, not unlike Nathan Drake (a hero clearly modeled after Jones). A thrilling opening sequence sees him escaping a tomb that slowly fills up with sand, running and sliding as rocks collapse around him. However, the gameplay presentation stresses that The Great Circle is much more unique in a way that feels fitting for Indiana Jones.

That starts with his toolkit. First, there’s his whip, which can be used for platforming, combat, and puzzle-solving. In one clip, he picks up a trident and tosses it into a wall, creating a grapple point that allows him to cross a gap. In another section, he sneaks his way into a collapsed tomb by lowering himself near a hole in a wall and climbing in. MachineGames gets a lot of use out of that tool that goes beyond just yanking guns out of Nazi hands.

In addition to the whip, Jones carries a camera that has a few uses. Players can use it to take photos of landmarks or clues, which are stored in a constantly evolving journal. Photos also grant players Adventure Points, a currency that can be spent to unlock skills earned by collecting Adventure Books. Touches like that make the adventure feel like it’s more tailored around the franchise, rather than Indiana Jones getting squeezed into a template.

In fact, The Great Circle looks less like Uncharted and more like Hitman at times. There are immersive sim touches to it that stand out. For instance, Jones can don disguises to break into locked areas. Some levels allow for some open-ended approaches, too. In a clip exclusive to the press presentation, I saw Jones infiltrate a tomb. Three guards stand outside of it. He decides to deal with them by swinging off a grapple point, taking down one guard with his whip, knocking the one next to him out with punches, and finishing the third off with his revolver. MachineGames notes that there are a lot of ways to deal with situations like that, from stealth to going in guns blazing.

From Wolfenstein to Riddick

Improvisation is the key and it seems like there are a few fun ways to achieve it. One clip shows Jones picking up a rolling pin off a chair and smacking a guard over the head with it (another shows him doing the same with a shovel). One stealth sequence shows him tossing objects around a room to distract enemies in gameplay that calls back to MachineGames’ Wolfenstein titles . The developer also cites its work on The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay as a guiding inspiration here, and that certainly shows in its creative approach to first-person action and exploration, as well as its occasional third-person switches.

Take its combat, for instance. While MachineGames is known for its high-octane shooting, that’s not Jones’ primary means of battling. Instead, his main tool is his fists. He can punch, parry, block, hit combos, and even perform finishers in first-person. In one fight, I watch him knock a helmet off a Nazi’s head before pummeling him with some stiff hits. That close-quarters action sets The Great Circle apart from other games in the genre, making battles feel more up close and personal.

There’s a greater emphasis on puzzle-solving too, which is perhaps its biggest parallel to Uncharted here. The Great Circle is filled with environmental puzzles that’ll require some clever thinking and a good memory (that’s where the camera comes in handy). In one section, Jones finds a statue of a historical figure associated with Jesus. He pours a bottle of wine into a receptacle in front of it, revealing a number. Later, Jones finds a statue of Jesus surrounded by levers with numbered positions and uses that clue to solve it. Puzzles require some logic and reasoning to solve, though their difficulty can be toggled down independent of combat.

All of this is a major evolution for MachineGames. While the studio has always specialized in first-person games, this is its biggest swing yet. The studio says that The Great Circle is its largest and longest project to date. It’s full of sidequests, collectibles, and secrets spread across some open-ended areas. This isn’t a studio simply sticking to its formula and tossing an IP skin over it. I get the sense that MachineGames had to think bigger and more outside the box to properly capture the grand vibe of the films. The end result is promising, showing that Indiana Jones isn’t just going to be Xbox’s own Nathan Drake. He’s getting the star treatment he deserves.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle launches on December 9 Xbox Series X/S and PC. It’s coming to PS5 in spring 2025.

Editors’ Recommendations

• Everything announced at Gamescom Opening Night Live 2024
• Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster is more like Dead Space’s remake than Resident Evil 4’s
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: release date window, trailers, gameplay, and more
• Fable finally shows off some gameplay at the Xbox Games Showcase
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle’s release date remains a mystery
• Summer Gaming Marathon

Starfield's upcoming expansion Shattered Space received a new trailer during the Xbox Game Showcase today. Showing off new areas with an art style that's a drastic departure from the gray wasteland of empty rocks we've come to expect, Shattered Space will focus on the religious House Va'runn from the base game.

The trailer showcases many new areas, along with lightning storms, ghostly apparitions, and a significant chunk of new monster and alien designs. It's a far cry from the stagnated art design of the original game and an indication that Shattered Space looks to right some of the wrongs of Starfield's original launch.

During the June 2024 Xbox Games Showcase, Undead Labs showed off a new trailer for State of Decay 3. While the trailer didn't reveal a release date, it did show some new gameplay. The studio also has a new logo, representing its transition from being an indie studio to an Xbox one.

The trailer shows a desolate world filled with zombies and third-person shooter gameplay. The atmosphere feels much more fantastical and supernatural with its red hues, and is akin to Redfall rather than games with a more realistic tone like The Last of Us or Days Gone.

During the June 2024 Xbox Games Showcase, Microsoft revealed Doom: The Dark Ages. It's a medieval take on the first-person shooter series that's typically set during contemporary times. It's set to launch in 2025 for PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5. The game will also launch on Xbox Game Pass.

Doom: The Dark Ages is a prequel, with the Doomslayer donning animal fur and spikes on his shoulder-blade armor. With his trusty and classic shotgun, he's ready to take down demons. However, he now has a new shield with blades that he can rev up like a chainsaw. The trailer shows the Doomslayer even throwing his shield at them like Captain America. He will also be able to ride a dragon at some point in the game, highlighting the fantasy elements of the game.