WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Uncharted, now playing in theaters.
Uncharted has already been slammed by critics as a poor adventure movie and another bad adaptation of a video game. But what really stands out is the way its main characters, Nathan Drake and Victor Sullivan, deviate from their game counterparts. Let’s dive into this adaptation of Uncharted and break down why its lead characters fail to live up to expectations.
The Uncharted video games have everything to make a great movie — outstanding set pieces, four game storylines that would make Indiana Jones blush and, above all, great character development. And to make things even more exciting, Playstation has a knack for character building with titles, not only with its four Uncharted entries but also with The Last of Us and God of War. So, after all those facts are considered, it is hard to comprehend how the characters in the live-action Uncharted missed the mark.
Over a decade in the making, there was plenty of time to develop a quality-driven story to the screen and to develop its main characters Nathan Drake and Victor Sullivan, played by Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg, respectively. Given that four games already deal with the backstory of these characters, one would imagine that its movie adaptation would be easy enough to follow. Instead, the film falls short of heart in that department, even with five writers attached to its screenplay.
To play Nathan Drake, choosing Holland seemed like a smart move, mostly because he’s a rising star who would bring a younger to theatres, especially after the tremendous success of Spider-Man: No Way Home. The script is also an origin story that could potentially build a franchise and give the opportunity for Holland to grow with the character and eventually achieve a Nathan Drake looks closer to that of the games.
Unfortunately, Holland’s version of the character is bland and uninteresting. He is a restrained adventure seeker who, while knowing his History lessons, isn’t as overconfident and assertive as the young Nate from the video games. In the movie, he’s more like a geek with aspirations to be like his older brother Sam, who vanished earlier in his life and kept contacting him through postcards. That’s a massive departure from the games, where Nathan is every bit as cool as his brother.
On the other side, after initially signing on to play Nathan Drake, Wahlberg was recast as Sully. And, just like Holland, the actor fails to fill the character’s shoes. Wahlberg plays a pugnacious, kind of hostile and unsympathetic character, which is a far way away from the video game version. Sully is supposed to become a mentor and sort of father figure to Nate, and while one could argue that could still happen down the line, it’s hard to pull that from Wahlberg’s performance.
Uncharted is performing well enough that it may get another installment or two to attempt to get things right, but as it stands, fans of the game franchise had little more to cling to than a couple of action set pieces.
To see Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg fail to do right by their characters, Uncharted is in theaters now.
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