Movie Review: 'Uncharted' Tom Holland is a Bona Fide Action Hero

Uncharted stars Tom Holland as Nathan Drake and more and more I am enjoying Holland as a screen presence. Having grown weary of the quip machine action heroes that have dominated the last two decades of Hollywood action, Holland’s more cerebral and achingly emotional action hero feels refreshing. Holland’s Nathan Drake can be funny but he’s first and foremost a pro with a good head on his shoulders. He’s not flippant and doesn’t just go for the joke when one is available. Holland has an unforced charisma that makes an otherwise dreary exercise in the action genre, more entertaining than I was expecting.

Uncharted starts fast with our hero, young adventurer, Nathan Drake, falling out of an airplane. It’s the kind of wild and wooly stunt that has made Tom Cruise one of the most entertaining action heroes in the genre. We watch as the scene is set for one of the major action set pieces in Uncharted before we flashback to how our hero got to this dangerous spot. It’s a little clichéd but, as I said, Holland makes the familiar refreshing with his performance.

Flashback to Nathan as a child, alongside his beloved older brother Sam. The two break into a museum because Sam wants to steal the first known map of the world. It’s an ambitious crime for a teenager and that he and his tiny accomplice are caught is fitting considering the high stakes involved. This is the set up for Sam to disappear and for Nathan to be left behind to wonder what happened to his brother and become jaded by being left behind.

Nathan grows up to work in a bar and run small time cons where he steals expensive jewelry off the hands of the unknowing trust funders in his midst. The course of Nathan’s life is altered however, when he meets Victor ‘Sully’ Sullivan (Mark Wahlberg). Sully steals one of Nathan’s more expensive cons and invites Nathan to retrieve it at a meeting later that night. There, Sully reveals that he’d been working with Nathan’s brother to find a lost treasure that Sam had always talked about.

Sully reveals that Sam went missing amid their search for this billion dollar treasure and he doesn’t think Sam is still alive. Sully wants Nathan to be his partner and in exchange he can take him to the people who may or may not have killed Sam. After some hesitation, Nathan agrees and the two launch a scheme to retrieve a gold and diamond encrusted cross that they both believe is a key to the location of the real treasure.

The auction set piece, featured prominently in the trailer for Uncharted, may not be surprising, given all of the spoilers in the trailer, but regardless of that, Tom Holland appears to be having a blast. Rather than being tougher than the tough guys, we watch as Holland outsmarts the baddies, calling on his fighting skills rarely. Nathan can fight but I enjoyed how the movie doesn’t make him appear superhuman. He doesn’t have super powers, he has wit and instinct and Holland gives life to these gifts in a believable way.

Uncharted was directed by Ruben Fleischer, a director with a talent for charming crowd pleasers. Fleischer has a good instinct for action and light hearted humor. I haven’t loved everything he’s done, the sequel to Zombieland was an outright crime, but I do think he has a great knack for pleasing crowds with deft humor and big moments, well timed to the pace of his action adventure movies.

Zombieland 2 failed because he let the worst of his instincts take hold and lost the wonderful dynamic between his all star ensemble in favor of the easiest available gags. No such trouble with Uncharted as he lets the easy chemistry of Holland and Wahlberg do all the charming while he stages big action on par with the kind of crazy I’ve come to enjoy about another action franchise that challenges physics and succeeds on pure silliness, The Fast and the Furious.

I will say, Fleischer needs to work on his work on building female characters. The female leads of Uncharted are desperately underwritten to the point of coming off like the same character. Sophia Taylor Ali and Tati Gabrielle are more archetypal ‘strong female characters’ than they are actual characters. The good old boys of Hollywood have convinced themselves that if they let the girls shoot guns and fight, then they’ve done their part for equality. They’re still not putting in the work to give women the kinds of characters that stand apart from the tough-girl aesthetics.

Uncharted opened in theaters on February 18th, 2022.