Uncharted

Year 15, Day 244 - 9/1/23 - Movie #4,534

BEFORE: Antonio Banderas carries over again from "Beyond the Edge" and that makes four in a row for him, but I'm going for five Banderases...

And here are the other links that should get me through September: Toby Jones, Monica Dolan, Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Dean-Charles Chapman, Claire Foy, Haluk Bilinger, Liev Schreiber, Tom Hanks, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Colman Domingo, Ari'el Stachel, Olivia Wilde, Jane Fonda and Andy Richter.  I believe that will take me right up to the start of the horror chain - you can almost feel that Halloween chill in the air tonight...just 21 films until October.

THE PLOT: Street-smart Nathan Drake is recruited by seasoned treasure hunter Victor "Sully" Sullivan to recover a fortune amassed by Ferdinand Magellan and lost 500 years ago by the House of Moncade. 

AFTER: Was this movie in theaters?  I guess so, but I must have been very busy in February or something - yeah, that tracks.  It sure got to Netflix in a hurry, which was good news for me.  That window from theaters to streaming is getting shorter and shorter - I went to see "Asteroid City" and tomorrow's movie in theaters, just to be on the safe side, but I was fairly sure that "Asteroid City" would be on Peacock or something before I needed to post my review.  Now I guess I could watch it a second time before I post, should I need to.  I do dig the Wes Anderson movies...

I'm really getting close to the end of the year now - once you take away the slots needed for October horror movies, then factor in three Thanksgiving movies and three Christmas movies, and the connective tissue needed to GET to all of those, well, it doesn't really leave me a lot to play with. September's really the last month where I can just go a little nuts, I can watch just about anything, as long as I end the month with a movie starring one of three people.  I can finally get to "Elvis" and "Don't Worry Darling" and "The Trip to Greece", and "Marcel the Shell with Shoes On" - you know, just to see what all the fuss was about.  It's my last chance to freestyle it, because I knew exactly which horror films to put in the chain, and then once I knew where that ended, well, November and December practically programmed themselves, all I did was find the path.  

I've never played this "Uncharted" video-game - hell, I haven't played any video-games in the last three years, except I did take another run through "GTA 3" and "GTA: Vice City" during the pandemic, but then I was back to work before I could play through "Lego Star Wars" again. (Maybe during the next pandemic...). But I am helping my wife get through "Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom", I solve a few puzzles for her here and there and try to navigate her to find all of the side quests.  She's playing, I just hold the maps and give her directions.  But this film looked intriguing enough and non-video-game-like enough for me to give it a go.

It really drags a bit here and there, I'd imagine a movie based on a video-game should be non-stop action, hell, any action movie should be non-stop action, but this one has long talkie parts and if the characters are talking, they ain't DOING. Really, what's to explain, just hurry up and get to the next stunt or the next CGI-created location.  And Sony's PlayStation Productions had the nerve to create a whole opening montage of all of the great movies featuring their characters, except there really aren't any, because this is the company's first feature film. Weird, huh?  But I guess they have to compete with Marvel and DC, who get to run down their resumes at the start of every film. 

The film steals a trick from comic books, it opens with a "splash page" sequence of the main character after falling out of a plane, but tethered to some crates, then he has to jump like Super Mario from box to box to try to get back INTO the plane. Wait, who is this guy?  And how did he get thrown out of the plane?  Well, we'll find out later, but damn, didn't they grab your attention right from the start?  Now they'll snap back two weeks to show you how he got into that position.  Sure, a few movies have maybe used this technique, but not many - it's a bit of a storytelling cheat, perhaps, because if they open the film with this regular guy who just has a bartending job and nothing interesting ever happens to him until.... well, half of the audience is already asleep, nice job.  But a guy hanging out of a PLANE, one false move away from falling to his death, well, damn, you're wide awake, I'll bet!  (Tom Holland did learn real bartending "flair" moves for the role, but you know, those only go so far.)

Nathan's got an older brother who took off a few decades ago, in search of treasure somewhere in the world, and except for a few postcards, has sent no word back home.  But one night Sully comes in to the bar, and claims to need Nathan's help to track down his older brother, and it's got everything to do with the lost treasure that Magellan supposedly collected on this trip around the world, which never made it back to the family that financed his circumnavigation/treasure finding voyage.  Nathan's brother disappeared after helping Sully steal a diary that could detail the location of the treasure, and looks nothing at all like the "Grail diary" that Indiana Jones' father had in the "Last Crusade" movie, except that it obviously does.  

The two team up to create a distraction at an auction where the last descendant of the Moncada family is buying a golden cross that's linked to the Magellan voyage, and could be the key to finding the lost gold.  Umm, sure, but isn't the timing very suspicious here? I mean, this cross is hundreds of years old, didn't the Moncada family have other opportunities to buy it or steal it?  Why does it just happen to be in an auction RIGHT NOW?  I know, I know, because the story needed it to be available so the good guys could steal it and the bad guys couldn't get it.  It just feels like another narrative short-cut, that's all.  Things need to be difficult for the heroes, but not impossible.  

The two fly to Barcelona (in a sequence that also looks exactly like it came out of the "Indiana Jones" movies, with a tiny model plane flying across a map) and meet up with Sully's contact, who has the other golden cross.  If they can all trust each other (nearly impossible) then they can work together to figure out how the two crosses are the (literal) keys to unlocking more clues to the treasure location.  More "Tomb Raider"-like and "Indiana Jones"-like sequences follow in Barcelona, but eventually they learn that Princess Peach is in another castle!  I mean, they learn that the treasure is really in the Philippines. OK, cue that little model airplane graphic again...

Ah, but this time it's a cargo plane, and it belongs to the bad guys, and the good guys sneak aboard. Yep, you guessed it, this leads us right back to where the movie started, with our hero getting tossed out of a plane, along with a bunch of crates, a car and half of the boxes from that place where they stored the Lost Ark. JK.  Aerial stunts are great, even when they were probably done by wire work and not real skydiving, but a very common NITPICK POINT / pet peeve of mine, every single screenwriter seems to forget about how gravity and physics work.  Da Vinci proved way back when that everything falls to earth at the same speed, heavier objects don't "fall faster". I'll admit I'm not a skydiver, but I believe you also can't "fall faster" when you need to catch up with another object that is also falling.  Nope, impossible, it can't happen, not by changing your body shape or your wind resistance or just THINKING about catching up with the other object - it just can't be done. 

Nate's close, but he still needs to solve his brother's puzzle to determine the location of Magellan's ships, "Goonies"-style.  And after that, it's just one big battle on land, sea and air to defeat the evil power and try to salvage what they can of the treasure.  Yeah,  so this really picked up at the end, action-wise, which is great, but that doesn't really make up for how many really slow parts there were in the first half. 

Reading up on some details about the film on Wikipedia - the pre-production on this film started in 2008, so it took fourteen years to bring it to the screen, and only about 137 people were attached to direct it at different times.  It also seems that Mark Wahlberg was set to play Nathan Drake at one point, but along with the many changes in director came rewrite after rewrite, each director apparently wanted to start from scratch with a new script, and my guess would be that Wahlberg became too old to play that character while all this was going on.  Then, on top of all THAT, principal photography finally began on March 16, 2020, only to shut down THE SAME DAY because of the COVID-19 pandemic.  OK, filming resumed four months later, but what a stroke of bad luck. I imagine somewhere there's someone who finally achieved their dream of opening their dream restaurant around about that time, only to have to close it down first thing...

Also starring Tom Holland (last seen in "Venom: Let There Be Carnage"), Mark Wahlberg (last seen in "Contraband"), Sophia Ali (last seen in 'Everybody Wants Some!!"), Tati Gabrielle (last heard in "The Emoji Movie"), Steven Waddington (last seen in "Carrington"), Pingi Moli, Tiernan Jones, Rudy Pankow, Georgia Goodman (last seen in "Extinction"), Joseph Balderrama (last seen in "The Batman"), Serena Posadino, Alana Boden, Peter Seaton-Clark, Manuel de Blas, Nolan North (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie 2"), Pilou Asbaek (last seen in "The Great Wall").

RATING: 6 out of 10 nuns. ("Why is it always nuns?")