By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
Big-budget action adventures, the likes of The Mummy and Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, have fallen out of favor in Hollywood, but there’s one large exception: Uncharted. The big-budget video game adaptation is a throwback to a different era, from the large setpieces and globe-trotting adventure and the star power of Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg when we’ve been told no one cares about stars anymore. For the last decade, this has been the domain of the Fast and Furious franchise, but with Holland’s adventure as Nathan Drake continuing to be a streaming success, it recently placed in Max’s Top Five, the tide could be turning.Â
Uncharted Is A Globe-Trotting Adventure
Uncharted may be adapting the hit PlayStation 3 game, but the film, with Tom Holland as the adventurer Nathan Drake, quickly goes off in a different direction, changing character origins and motivations, and the plot does its own thing. In the film, Drake is considerably younger than the grizzled, world-weary adventurer of the first game, and here he’s looking for the lost ships of Magellan and not the treasure of Sir Francis Drake. Joining him is Mark Wahlberg as Sully, his brother’s former partner, and Sophia Ali as Chloe, another fortune hunter (voiced in the game by Farscape’s Claudia Black), and while the trio eventually works together, it’s the banter and arguing that helps drive the entire first half of the movie forward.Â
The adventure in Uncharted goes from a high-end auction to the sewers of Barcelona and, eventually, an exotic tropical island that’s been hiding a mystery for centuries. All throughout, Drake and his friends have to deal with the mercenaries hired by the wealthy Santiago Moncada, played with the perfect amount of slime and arrogance by Antonio Banderas. It’s a standard, numbers old-school Hollywood adventure, but for an audience starved of that sort of film, it’s a breath of fresh air.
Ironically, Uncharted spent so long in production that Mark Wahlberg was originally cast to play Nathan Drake, but by the time cameras started to roll in 2020, Wahlberg was playing Sully, the older mentor. On the first day of shooting, production was shut down within hours due to the onset of the COVID pandemic. Thankfully, that was the last hurdle to clear, given the film was first optioned for production in 2008.
Tom Holland Is The Next Big Thing
Though Uncharted is fun, it was dinged by the critics, as most ended up summing it up on Rotten Tomatoes as being aggressively average, explaining the 41 percent rating they gave the film. Audiences, on the other hand, enjoy a fun film that doesn’t require them to think too hard for two hours and can sit back and enjoy, giving it an 89 percent fresh rating. It’s not a film for critics, and audiences rewarded it, bringing in $401 million at the box office, and during the Summer of 2024, Sony confirmed a sequel is in development.
Video game movies are starting to get noticed by Hollywood, with both Mario and Sonic posting eye-popping numbers, while superhero films start to falter. On streaming, video games are everywhere you look: there’s Amazon Prime Video’s Fallout, Max’s The Last of Us, and even Peacock got in on the action with Twisted Metal. Uncharted may be carving its own path away from the award-winning Naughty Dog franchise, but Tom Holland is still involved, which is now a double-edged sword.
It will be some time until we get to see Uncharted 2 because of Holland’s busy schedule. First, he needs to finish filming Christopher Nolan’s next film, The Odyssey, and then production can start, placing a sequel in 2027 at the earliest. If the sequel never materializes, at least the first film stands as the best action-adventure of the decade
Uncharted is streaming on Max.