WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Uncharted, now playing in theaters.
Uncharted is overall a largely forgettable adventure film, adapting the videogame series of the same name. Nathan Drake (Tom Holland) and Sully (Mark Wahlberg) are the leads, traveling the world on an adventure to collect one of the greatest lost treasures of all time. The movie is largely by-the-numbers in a lot of little ways, squandering some great potential, including a villain who could have been a stand-out.
Uncharted‘s Jo Braddock (Tati Gabrielle), initially introduced as the muscle for Santiago Moncada (Antonio Banderas) before taking center-stage herself, could have been a terrific antagonist for the movie. But — like much of the film around her — her turn feels underserved, squandering the potential a more fleshed version of the character could have granted the plot.
In theory, Jo Braddock is a great villain for the film. A deadly mercenary and a treasure hunter in her own right, she’s repeatedly shown to have a defined antagonism with both Nathan and Sully. Years earlier, she’d been a partner to Sully — and is implied to have become both a pupil and love interest to the seasoned adventurer. She eventually turned against him and began working for Santiago Moncada, embracing a lethal ruthlessness that not even the perpetually self-absorbed Sully could really accept.
It was during this period that she chased down Sully and his then partner Sam Drake (Rudy Pankow). Braddock was responsible for Sam’s supposed death, eventually leading Sully to recruit Nathan to try and finish his brother’s work. The closest thing the typically innocent Nathan has to a dark side is exposed by Braddock, with Nathan risking his life to even just confront Braddock and try to learn the truth about his brother’s supposed demise.
Braddock could have had the unique position of being a foil to both Nathan and Sully, showcasing the dark directions both men could have gone. Her unapologetic mercenary status initially makes her the ideal muscle for Uncharted‘s apparent primary antagonist, the smooth but twitchy Moncada. But her full ruthless nature comes to the forefront when she casually murders Moncada when she grows tired of his angst. The beat works well, hitting him mid-monologue and catching everyone (especially Moncada himself) off guard. It’s a fun twist that could’ve landed harder if the character had been better established. Gabrielle even delivers a decently menacing performance at times, giving Braddock a detached brutality that makes her all the more dangerous.
Unfortunately, the script largely fails the character. The ways she’s positioned as Nathan’s foil largely fall flat, and the pair rarely share the screen. She has no clear personal vendetta against Sully or Nathan, meaning she stays largely removed from any of the film’s emotional stakes. Her dislike for Sully is more or less just a minor detail instead of a defining element. Even her eventual final battle with Nathan plays out relatively blandly, with the pair mentioning Sam once before trying to push each other off the boat. Her demise in Uncharted‘s final stretch doesn’t carry any additional weight, as Nathan and Sully immediately ignore the fact that they just killed her in a pretty brutal fashion.
It’s ultimately a disappointment, as Braddock had potential as a villain. Her antagonism with Sully could have been rooted in his tendency to only look out for himself — giving her a personal reason to hate him and making his eventual development into a more loyal brotherly figure to Nathan all the more important. Likewise, if she’d been established with a history with Sam outside of just shooting him and sort of bragging about it, she could have twisted an emotional knife into Nathan. As she stands, Braddock is more or less the problem with Uncharted in a nutshell: a good performer with strong stunt skills, whose unique potential attributes are sanded down by a lackluster script.
To see how Jo Braddock becomes the main baddie, Uncharted is now in theaters.
About The Author
