Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg retrace familiar action-movie routes in Uncharted
Adapted from the popular video game series, the whole thing plays like ersatz Indiana Jones
Film Reviews Tom Holland
Like text that’s been translated into another language and then re-translated back by someone else, Uncharted bears a clunky resemblance to any number of classic action-adventure movies. Technically, the film is a loose adaptation of Naughty Dog’s popular PlayStation video game series featuring treasure hunter Nathan Drake and his quest to solve various historical mysteries. Because the games themselves are heavily influenced by Hollywood, however, turning them into an actual, non-interactive movie inevitably creates an off-brand approximation of familiar multiplex fare. It’s a personality-free jumble of Indiana Jones, James Bond, National Treasure, The Da Vinci Code, and the more obnoxious Pirates Of The Caribbean sequels, serving up less inspired variations on fights, stunts, and clues you’ve seen before… minus all the distinct fun of navigating them yourself.
What’s more, Uncharted isn’t even especially good fan service. Rather than adapt any of the actual games, its three credited screenwriters chose to invent a new origin story—one that omits the franchise’s primary female character, Elena Fisher. Drake, originally a sardonic figure clearly modeled after vintage Harrison Ford, is embodied onscreen by Tom Holland, who sheds his adolescent Peter Parker dorkiness but doesn’t replace it with anything especially forceful or memorable.
Following a quick in medias res opening (missing only the record scratch plus freeze-frame plus “Yep, that’s me”) and teen prologue (setting up Drake’s beloved, otherwise unseen older brother), we first encounter young Nathan working as a New York City bartender, flirting with customers as a prelude to picking their pockets. Almost immediately, he’s recruited by a former associate of his brother, Victor Sullivan (Mark Wahlberg, looking and sounding very little like the games’ gruff, mustachioed Sully), who wants Drake’s help in recovering—stealing, really—a centuries-old ornate cross that Sully claims is one of two secret keys that may unlock Ferdinand Magellan’s lost cache of gold. Sure, says Drake, because, hey, why not?
That degree of functional cutscene efficiency predominates throughout. Rarely do we get more from a non-action scene than the absolute minimum required to move the plot forward. Non-expository dialogue frequently has the general shape of badinage but lacks any actual wit, or even humor. (“Everything out of this one’s mouth is an exaggeration, a half-truth or an outright lie,” someone tells Drake of Sully. The latter’s deathless rejoinder: “You know what? That is not true!”) Occasionally, something legitimately funny sneaks in—there’s a terrific payoff to Drake’s reason for including a cat in the list of items he needs Sully to procure for him at one point—but Uncharted’s default mode is disappointingly generic. That’s especially true of its ostensible bad guy, rival treasure hunter Santiago Moncada (Antonio Banderas), whose ruthlessness might as well be a cruise-control setting. Only marginally more interesting are Moncado’s primary muscle, Jo Braddock (Tati Gabrielle, appropriately fierce in a traditionally male role), and game favorite Chloe Frazer (Sophia Ali), whose motives and loyalties remain typically ambiguous.
What does more or less satisfy, if only because the movies are somewhat starved for them at the moment, are Uncharted’s relatively low-key Indiana Jones homages. The lifts are fairly shameless—there are set pieces unmistakably inspired by specific parts of Raiders and Last Crusade—but it’s hard to completely screw up that combination of archaeological puzzle-solving and ancient-threat management. (Dan Brown adaptations, which skimp on the latter, have done a poor job of filling the void.)
Alas, everything skews gargantuan these days, and director Ruben Fleischer (who’s previously helmed the Zombieland films and the first Venom) also orchestrates some physics-defying green-screen outrageousness, riffing on vertiginous action scenes from the games. Clambering up a series of crates dangling from a plane’s cargo hold is a blast in Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception; watching Tom Holland do the same on the big screen, it’s hard not to look around for Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris. By the time Drake is engaged in pirate-style skirmishes on the deck of a sailing ship being airlifted by a helicopter, Uncharted has fashioned an exhaustively detailed map of the average viewer’s Blu-ray collection and/or Netflix queue. And if you’re somehow hungry for a sequel, never fear: Uncharted 2 (ft. Pilou Asbæk) actually kicks off during the closing credits. This is how we live now, apparently.
122 Comments
A big problem with the very idea of an Uncharted movie is that the games are very intentionally built around elaborate set pieces that movies can’t pull off convincingly. They can move effortlessly throughout elaborate action sequences in a single shot, something that would look cheap and CGI-ish in a film. (This is why the best inadvertent Uncharted adaptation is Tin Tin) So an Uncharted movie, in my opinion, would be better off avoiding that sort of 0ver-the-top CGI spectacle and go for in-camera effects and set pieces.
If they want it to be true to the games there should also be a 45 minute sequence where he runs around an old ruin looking for some way to advance to the next area before just saying “F—- it” and checking a Gamefaqs walkthrough.
Tom Holland should also murder about 150 people over the course of the film.
So there’s like 10 uncut minutes of Tom Holland standing around waiting for player input, with idle animations of him “thwipping” as an easter egg.
Mark Wahlberg : “Stop. I’ve seen this before.”
Tom Holland : “What, Sully? What’s the big deal? Why are we stopping?”
Wahlberg : “Chest-high cover.”
You nailed my feelings on it as well. It was already CGI to begin with, so recreating large set pieces again with CGI makes this look like watching a playthrough with some character re-skins.
Yeah, i was thinking this would work if it riffed on the Mission: Impossible style of action movies.
The other thing is Uncharted in itself is basically another Raiders or Tomb Raider or myriad of other movies/games in the same vein. What I mean, it’s not like it’s a “unique” genre and it was always pretty likely destined to have a “been there, done that” feel to it anyways. It would really need actors and a great script to stand out and it doesn’t sound like they’ve accomplished that.
A big problem with the very idea of an Uncharted movie is that Uncharted is just off-brand Indiana Jones substitute. You can’t make a movie out of that.
I think an Uncharted movie could get away with building to one huge, climatic, elaborate, set piece if smaller, more contained ones lead up to it. From the trailer they appeared to take at least two of the most over the top set pieces from two different games and shoved them in this movie. The games spaced out the set pieces with character building, exploration, a lot of shooting, and naturally flowed to the next big set piece. Obviously a movie doesn’t have that same amount of time, but the answer clearly isn’t to just shove more massive set pieces into a shorter time frame.
There’s also a question of style. The latest Bond was full of CGI but it rarely felt it. The bit where the car on the bridge nearly runs over a ducked down Bond is basically 100% CGI (bar some reference photoscans) but feels real. But as you say, everyone wants to do impossible camera moves that just feel like pre Vis animatics.
Does Tom Holland have some kind of skin condition that defies green screen technology? The publicity still up top looks like it was shot in a Sears portrait studio (are those islands, or is that wallpaper of islands?) and the way he stood out from the background during the bridge sequence in the last Spiderman movie looked like it was straight out of 1985.
not trying to disrespect anyone who’s job it is, but i’ve noticed vfx took a nosedive since covid. some of the stuff from the bus scene in shang-chi looked like it was from 1998. considering uncharted and no way home were entirely made during covid i think that’s why they look even more artificial than usual. everything looks like a soundstage.
If physical effects are being replaced with CGI because they couldn’t film big scenes live then that would make sense. But given how much processing power even a laptop has these days there’s no reason we shouldn’t be seeing much more photorealistic effects.
Yeah, your phone almost certainly has more processing power than the $50K Silicon Graphics Workstations that were used for the effects in Jurassic Park.
…but when you opening your phone, do you exclaim “It’s Unix system! I know this!”?
It’s not a question of processing power though. It’s dependent on technical skill and time, both of which are affected by budgets and schedules. So complex shots are split between multiple teams halfa world apart. Then there’s a pipeline where it doesn’t matter if 8 stages are done well, all it takes is one stage to fuck up the whole thing. There’s also a question of lighting. Did they get enough reference on set? Is the real stuff lit in a way that can be matched by the fake stuff? Is the fake stuff mimicking all the weird side effects of photography (motion blur, depth of focus, exposure levels, contrast, etc etc).TLDR Effects are really hard to do right, regardless of how powerful laptops and software have got.
You would’ve thought that COVID would’ve made shooting on location easier – less traffic to deal with, fresh air, etc.
In May 2020, who would have complained if they shut down a bridge to make a movie on some random Tuesday afternoon?
Most of these set pieces are shot on sound stages. The bus scene in Shang-Chi, for instance, was shot on a sound stage with the actual bus on huge gimbles moving it around. Any background you see is CGI or photo mattes. When you have the actors swinging around on wires on the exterior of a bus there’s no safe ways to do it on location. A sound stage also allows for easy tweaking of staging, camera placement, lighting etc. and resets take a matter of minutes rather than hours. The only shots of the bus that were on location were it barreling down the streets in wide shots and even then a lot of that was CGI. Closing down some of the more famous streets in San Fran is expensive, Covid doesn’t effect how much permits cost or how little time you have to shoot before you have to open up the streets again and come back tomorrow. If you actually try to crash a bus, and the shot goes wrong in one of the million ways it can, you’re done for the day. Just clearing the wreckage takes hours. That’s why films with big car chases involving lots of crashes and practical work intercut establishing shots of the recognizable cities they are supposed to be in but the actual crash sequences are shot on basically unused roads. Usually in Vancouver, Georgia or Eastern Europe due to the favorable tax incentives.
Clearly no one told that to Chris “Let’s just flip the truck” Nolan.
There’s no shortage of practical driving stunts and crashes in movies like flipping a truck. Someone had specifically brought up why the Shang-Chi bus fight wasn’t done on location and it was because of the complexity of the sequence. If you’re just doing a shot of a crash, doing it practical is usually easier, often cheaper, and much more convincing than CGI. Just sticking with Marvel stuff, there’s been many practical crashes and flipped trucks for instance.
i was specifically talking about the cgi shots of the bus. the bus itself looked fake as hell.
I was floored when Shang Chi got a best effects nomination. The bus scene – which is otherwise excellent – at least has the benefit of everything else happening distracting you from just how bad the bendy parts of the bendy bus looked. The big fight between father and son though, it was like the intro to FFVIII except with worse lighting.
The bus was almost entirely a practical effect in Shang-Chi. You can see how they did it in the Assembled episode. I thought it looked great expect for some just okay matting here and there.
I hadn’t really paid attention to the trailer before. Between it and the stills…this is some Z-grade CGI. And for god’s sake can we stop with the leaping-from-one-falling-object-to-another bullshit? Especially if doing so behind a plane traveling a couple of hundred miles per hour??? GRAVITY ISN’T GRADUAL. Well, yeah it is because you accelerate as you fall, but you know what I fucking mean.
I think it’s just his face. Whenever he’s on screen in any movies ever since he popped up in Captain America: Civil War, my Ma keeps saying he looks like “those computer-generated people from your games”.
Tom Holland is so small and child-like one wonders if he has some sort of ailment that stunts his growth. Either way, he looks sickly, and I believe him more as an adventurer’s pet sidekick who lives in a backpack than as the adventurer.So weird how Hollywood continues to book British actors as purportedly rough and rugged American types. Holland would be better served starring as a Teletubby.
After Red Notice and Jungle Cruise, I am very cautious about movies in the general form of movies I have liked before, with some actors I have liked before, but with worrying execution red flags.
What on Earth made you think either of those movies would be any good at all?
That’s a good question.I suppose part of it is just casting. I have liked Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds, Emily Blunt, Jesse Plemons, Ritu Arya, and so on in some prior projects.And I suppose part was wishful thinking—I like a decent action-adventure-comedy, and I wish there were more decent ones.So I told myself, maybe these will at least be some fun. They were not (although to me Red Notice was more offensively bad than Jungle Cruise).
Okay, but in the “video game movie” genre, a C+ makes it the second best one ever.
Didn’t they make two Angry Birds movies?I actually keep forgetting to check out Werewolves Within, which I have been told is actually a decent (not great, just decent) video game movie.
It is a good movie but I didn’t even realize it was a videogame until after having seen it
Sonic The Hedgehog was a solid B-or-so.(Dowd gave it a D or something, because he doesn’t like movies, but it was anyway.)
it’s always funny when a long-gestating project finally comes out and it’s the weirdest possible version it could be.i remember long ago when hugh jackman and david o russell were gonna do uncharted, and nothing makes me laugh more than wahlberg being attached for so long he aged out of the lead and into the mentor role.anyway, considering it feels like sony only fast-tracked this to keep tom holland happy, and while holland has fans they don’t appear to go see any of his movies aside from spider-man, i’m very curious to see how this is received by the general public.
At least Wahlberg always looked like an adult. I have a hard time accepting Holland being old enough to bartend.
Should have cast the Evan Hansen guy
So does the movie, apparently — it’s one of the first lines we hear in the trailer!
Wahlberg is still a better fit for Drake than Holland.
I think both casting choices were bad but, Wahlberg isn’t a better fit for… anything really.
Not even a reality tv show about burgers?
Someone needs to get Tom Holland a better agent. Why does he keep trying to break out of Spider-Man by doing the least convincing movies you could imagine?
“Chaos Walking” was just some dark place between terrible and boring.
robert pattinson also said in an interview recently that there just aren’t roles anymore, either. he was told that before tenet and batman he wasn’t on the list, but now that he’s on the list there’s no movies to put him in.wouldn’t be surprised if holland is in a similar spot. timothee chalamet seems to be the only guy who’s capable of navigating hollywood right now.
I guess Bruce Willis took all the roles.
You mean Bruce Willis’s body double, of course, shotmyheartandiwishiwasn’tok.
And Chalamet mostly makes movies that aren’t considered “hollywood” anyway.
I don’t know, that doesn’t sound quite right. Maybe if you demand to be paid millions and millions of dollars there aren’t any roles?But surely with the streaming wars and everyone trying to make their new original programming, there’s lots of stuff being made.
wouldn’t be the first time something that makes no sense is true in hollywood.
Maybe if you demand to be paid millions and millions of dollars there aren’t any roles?
But if you’re in a movie that’s angling to net $100m+, shouldn’t they be paying you a decent cut? I doubt Pattinson was talking about low- budget indie films there, because he’s been in about three of those a year for the last decade.
Maybe he means no roles in film, because television has more roles than it knows what to do with. But obviously you’d have to besmirch yourself by actually doing a show.
There are roles. Just not for Spider-Man money.
well and why shouldn’t there be? used to be jim carrey and tom cruise were making 20 million apiece for what would come off like a low budget indie these days.
Bc their presence in these movies isn’t pulling in the same audience for these films as they used to. IP is the bigger draw these days than the actors. I mean they should get paid whatever they can negotiate but the idea that you can just throw these dudes in average film comedies and those movies will pull $200 million or whatever at the box office just because they played Spider-Man are looking less and less likely.
This is just such bullshit, there are so many potential roles and so many actors out there, but the studios are absolutely terrified of losing money.
If I were an actor and really interested in the “acting” side of things more than the fame and fortune side of things, I guess I would go to england or New York as it seems like the movies that come out of there are less concerned with making a shit ton of money
The thing with Holland too is like… what role is there for a guy who’s in his 20’s, has a superhero body, but a squeaky voice and a baby face? He still looks too young for most of of the “adult” roles out there (see what happened to him in Cherry and The Devil All The Time) but he’s too shredded to play a teenager that’s not also a superhero. He fills a weird niche that is perfect for Spider-Man but makes casting him in a lot of other roles more difficult. Maybe in a few years he’ll really be able to break out of it, or he’ll finally land the perfect role for him.
Andrew Garfield’s career rebounded from Spider-Man, but Tobey Maguire’s didn’t. “Sensitive, pretty-boy action hero” is a shallow pool.
Why was it not just titled, “action movie tropes” ?
With your hero: Hard Long-Thicke.
Slab Bulkhead!
Drake Tungsten
With names like those, I’d hope this Uncharted movie has plenty of railing kills and a woman who gets killed and then reappears in the next scene.
“It was really nice of the captain to give that dead lady another shot.”
No, that’s the main character in Gilda.
Nathan Protein
I always enjoy these threads. They’re a great source of DnD characters.
I like the top pic; ‘starting to yawn’ is exactly the face that anyone would make in that situation, definitely.
Tom Holland has the same problem as his Spidey co-star Tobey Maguire: I cannot take them seriously as adults. He’s 25 and yet he looks 15 and so I’m going to be watching this whole movie thinking, “why isn’t he in math class?”
the high pitched voice will always hinder him a la michael cera (and tobey, yes), but i don’t think he looks like a teen anymore. his hairline and crows feet are getting there.
Is this why Michael Cera was such a great Tobey in Molly’s Game?
He definitely looks not so much as a teen anymore, I agree. I think the problem is he still has a smaller frame in both face and body type(even with him being buffer than he used to be) so when you put someone like Mark Wahlberg next to him, he’d still look smaller.
They should have just cast him young, as the (already canonical) teenage Nathan from one of the Uncharted games. Whatever they are doing here just feels like the end result of a bunch of compromises and typical Hollywood dumb choices, and so they’ve made another something for no one that kind of works and kind of doesn’t.
I definitely don’t know why they picked this twink to be Nathan Drake.
Because they liked this twink. Duh.
The material translated into a foreign language then translated back makes me think of Newsradio’s Jimmy James and his autobiography, Capitalist Lion Tamer, which failed domestically, but its successful Japanese translation was adapted back into English as Macho Business Donkey Wrestler, with its reconstituted writing resembling the kind of incoherent word salad from Google Translate’s alpha build.Why would they erase such a prominent character like Elena? Who is this movie even for if they have so little respect for the source material? You gotta check more than the action scene boxes, guys, and you’re gonna need to do a better job than chroma keying everything on a sound stage. Moonraker is one of my least favorite Bond films, but they at least filmed an incredible freefall stunt by trying to do something no one had done before. Disappointing but predictable outcome with Mark Wahlberg in another video game movie. I’m always tickled when people do an impression of him.
I loathe Wahlberg as an actor (and as a person, tbh) so anything he’s in is a bit NO for me.
“Why would they erase such a prominent character like Elena? Who is this movie even for if they have so little respect for the source material? You gotta check more than the action scene boxes, guys, and you’re gonna need to do a better job than chroma keying everything on a sound stage.”I keep beating this drum, but this is the main problem with game-based movies. Instead of trying to adapt the source material, the filmmakers just do their own thing; and then when it turns out crap they blame the source material so the cycle continues.See also: the Tomb Raider movie without any supernatural elements; the DOOM movie without any demons, the Rampage movie that didn’t have people turning into giant monsters and the Monster Hunter movie that isekai-ed Milla Jovovich.Personally I blame the Resident Evil movies, which were successful enough to codify that approach.
The last adaptation of Tomb Raider seemed to go out of its way to remove everything that made the character and series beloved. And the third act twist of no supernatural element was one of the most anticlimactic choices I’ve seen in a film. The actress was such a good casting choice to be in such a dud of a film.
I thought we didn’t like this Wahlberg anymore.
Fuck Marky Mark.
You know, maybe Marky Mark wants to use his popularity for a good cause. Make a contribution.
In fairness, some of us never have. Also, Tom Holland here seems to have the all the cockiness of a young Tom Cruise without any of the charisma to make it less irritating. Great gymnastic moves though.
Wait — there was a time we liked Mark Wahlberg?
Wait, there’s no shoehorning in a reference to Mark Wahlberg committing a crime 35 years ago, even though it has nothing to do with anything in the film? You guys are slipping.
What crime was that? Presumably something super minor and frivolous if it’s silly that people bring it up.
It was a serious crime that has absolutely nothing to do with almost any role Wahlberg has ever played. And yet it persists.
I’ve never heard of this! What crime was it? Please, type it out for us so we can all see how silly it is that people keep mentioning it.
I gave you the star. Time for bed.
I mean, I would love an “ersatz Indiana Jones”—the genre is long overdue for a revival—just, you know, a competent one.
The Indiana Jones movies set a pretty high bar for that, and every time you watch a movie that’s in that vein you’ll just end up thinking “Why am I watching this instead of Indiana Jones?”The Tomb Raider movies had that problem, in both iterations, and so will any Uncharted movies.
If they were actually more concerned with being true to the characters in Uncharted they could make a good Uncharted movie. These are well written and well acted characters, with interesting relationships and backstories, played out over dozens of hours of mo-capped acting scenes. It was literally all laid out for them, but rather than treating it like an adaption of a medium like a book, they were apparently more concerned with recreating some of the big set pieces from different games and shoehorning them into one movie.
I think The Mummy is still the best of the “let’s just copy Indiana Jones” movies.
Given how hit-and-miss the actual Indiana Jones franchise was, it’s hardly surprising how underwhelming the imitators are.
Adapted from the popular video game series, the whole thing plays like ersatz Indiana JonesSo, just like the games, then?
I’d love to see them sling a centuries-old waterlogged pirate ship under a helicopter, just to watch it disintegrate as soon as it’s lifted from the water.
Clearly they should have put it on top of a submarine.
Or immediately pull the helicopter back down into the water given how much it actually weighs.
I liked that it was tougher than the rocks the helicopter smashed it into. Those pirates could build a ship!
Somewhere, Nathan Fillion weeps.
Exactly. It’s ridiculous they didn’t go with him.
I would needed to have come together in 2010 to be Fillion. And also William Hurt should be Sully.
There’s a really good Uncharted fan film from 2018 with Fillion and Stephen Lang as Sully.
The trailer, at least the one in this article, had what I assume is the game Nathan Drake at the end. And he looks like Nathan Fillion.But the general public is not as attuned to the Fillion as those of us here, so they will not miss what they do not know.
Why the hell did I have to scroll this far down for a Nathan Fillion mention?
Presumably somewhere is like a Country Buffet or something (He’s too old, everyone you like is too old).
I realize that since we are about to get 80 year old Indy shortly that this seems a bit crazy, but isn’t Nathan a little too old to be playing this type of an action hero right now?
He’s 50 now, which is the new 38? But, since they’ve been trying to make this movie for at least ten years, it would have been fine if they moved quicker.
The true crime was replacing him in Santa Clarita Diet.
Based on everything I’ve seen and read of the Uncharted movie, it’s weird in the same sense as Tomb Raider was in that despite being a movie based on the video game, it doesn’t feel like it wants to be if that makes sense. Like they will have visual scenes that are clearly taken from the games, but none of the atmosphere or beats from the actual games. As a result, they just end up being generic action movies without a seeming identity.
It has none of the identity because these adaptions don’t seem to understand how important the characters are in the success of these games. They seem to think what’s beloved about the games is that one time Nate had to crawl across a cargo net blowing in the wind behind a C-130 in the game. Missing the whole point of why anyone does or would care about these characters. It was the hours and hours of mo-capped actors actually acting with each other that created a ongoing narrative and made them feel real, with all the flaws that come with that. Nate, Elena, Sully, Chloe are all very well defined characters. It’s all there for a writer to adapt it into an interesting film if the source material was in any way honored. Instead the writers said, uh, these characters have the same names as the game characters, and we’re going to throw in some huge set pieces from different games with no connection to why they’re even happening… so this should totally work.
I always thought that if they ever made Uncharted into a movie, it would have to star Nathan Fillion as Drake. I guess they waited too long.
This is really sad. It was obvious when that bloody stupid clip with the helicopter carrying the galleon appeared, that the whole thing had been misconceived from the writers room onwards. None of the games contained anything so stupid, so guaranteed to take your suspension of disbelief and stomp it into the ground. Were they realistic? Of course not. But they felt exciting because they were as close as you could get in a game to an old-fashioned adventure movie. When you’re actually making a movie, you don’t have to resort to endless CGI. Uncharted needed real stunts, real sets and real locations. What a waste.
The last Indiana Jones movie was an ersatz Indiana Jones movie too…so what’s your point?
Zoomer Sahara
No Elena and that’s not Sully. So it’s not Uncharted. It’s something, but not Uncharted.
I’m not going to watch, but I would be fucking furious if they used Elena as sequel-bait in the credits. Not that I care about her that much, but that movies have become so predictable that “wait til the sequel”-itis has become this terminal
“Rather than adapt any of the actual games, its three credited screenwriters chose to invent a new origin story—one that omits…”Oh look, it’s the exact mistake every movie based on a game makes. I bet people will hold it up and say “look, games don’t work as films” too so that the next production does exactly the same thing.
Holland’a management team seems hell bent on making sure his career ends after Spiderman. No way home is about to overtake avatar for highest box ofice and they have him starring with mark wallberg in a videogame adaptation February dreck. He’s also aging out of the awe shucks cute kid routine
wants Drake’s help in recovering—stealing, really—a centuries-old
ornate cross that Sully claims is one of two secret keys that may unlock
Ferdinand Magellan’s lost cache of gold. Sure, says Drake, because,
hey, why not? That degree of functional cutscene efficiency predominates throughout.
Well, he says “No,” actually, and there is at least some effort in trying to get Nate to come along- which he doesn’t do for the whole first Act until the he finds out about his brother. Trash the movie, fine, but don’t be disingenuous about things it is and isn’t doing.
I’d also disagree about the villains. Moncada actually had motivation, and some development thanks to the business with his father. Braddock has none of these things, making her the less interesting character by default. And Chloe was little more than a grouchy tag-along who at no point knew what she was doing; a far cry from the confident, charismatic figure from the games.I have my issues with the movie, but on the whole I can be flexible with it, and this review explains why in its very second sentence: the film is a loose adaptation of the game series, so I can roll with that. No different from how comic book movies often differ from their source material (including with casting) so I don’t see how being precious about one, but not the other, doesn’t come off as a bit hypocritical.
It pleases me to no end that Mark Walberg has been sinking to second billing. At best.
I liked it for what it was