‘Uncharted’ boldly goes nowhere

engadget.com:

There are worse movies than Uncharted, especially when it comes to the seemingly cursed genre of video game adaptations. But as I struggled to stay awake through the finale — yet another weightless action sequence where our heroes quip, defy physics and never feel like they're in any genuine danger — I couldn't help but wonder why the film was so aggressively average.

The PlayStation franchise started out as a Tomb Raider clone starring a dude who wasn't Indiana Jones. But, starting with Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, the games tapped into the language of action movies to put you in the center of innovative set pieces. They were cinematic in ways that few titles were in the early 2010s. But going in the opposite direction — bringing aspects of those games into a movie — doesn't work nearly as well.

Director Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland, Venom), along with screenwriters Rafe Lee Judkins, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway, have crafted an origin story for the treasure hunter Nathan Drake (Tom Holland). It hits the notes you're expecting — his childhood as an orphan, his first team-up with his partner Victor "Sully" Sullivan (Mark Wahlberg), and a globe-trotting treasure hunt that defies logic — but it's all just a Cliff's Notes version of what we've seen in the games. And for a franchise that was already a watered-down version of Indiana Jones, a movie adaptation just highlights all of its inherent flaws. Watching Uncharted made me long for the basic pleasures of Nicholas Cage's National Treasure – at least that Indy clone had personality.

Even the iconic action scenes don’t hit as hard. The film opens mid free-fall, as Drake realizes he just fell out of a plane. Discerning viewers will instantly recognize the sequence from Uncharted