YMMV / Uncharted (2022)

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Is Braddock always The Starscream or did she turn on Moncada for hiring Chloe behind her back, as that revelation seems to stun and anger her?
• Americans Hate Tingle: Spanish viewers were substantially miffed by the large licenses taken with the story fo the Magellan expedition, with the Moncada family subplot in particular attracting some controversy. Antonio Banderas was also often felt to be misused and/or underutilized.
• And You Thought It Would Fail: After being in Development Hell for more than a decade, paired with unfavorable opinions about casting and execution, one would think this would be a low-grossing Dump Month film riding off IP and Tom Holland's star power. However, the film managed to overperform its Presidents Day weekend box office expectation of 30 million dollars domestically, grossing over 51 million dollars instead. That weekend's global gross was $139M, which ballooned to do 401.6M, against a 120M budget. In a company email, Sony Pictures CEO Tom Rothman was quick to label a film "a movie franchise" as a result. The film finished at a respectable 11th place in the annual box office ranking.
• Awesome Music:
  • NO MIND, by MILKBLOOD, a synth-heavy banger played for the credits.
  • During the climax as Nate emerges wearing a familiar gun holster, the classic strains of the original theme from the games can be heard...
• Catharsis Factor: For those frustrated with seeing Chloe repeatedly betray Nate’s trust only to be seemingly forgiven moments later, it is quite satisfying watching her get tricked by Nate with a set of false coordinates, ending up angry, empty handed and trying in vain to pursue the heroes' helicopter in a speedboat.
• Cliché Storm: The film is a very by-the-book globe-trotting adventure movie, if at least competently executed.
• Critical Dissonance: For critics, this is yet another case of Video Game Movies Suck. But for the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes? Currently at 90%.
• Epileptic Trees: One theory floating around is the blond girl at the beginning of the film who Nate pickpockets is this continuty's Elena Fisher.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Considering the amount of Adaptation Deviation and Continuity Snarls, you'd be hard-pressed to find people who consider this film to be a prequel to the main Uncharted franchise. That being said, the movie could be considered an alternate origin story for Nathan Drake that doesn't follow the video games' timeline.
• Funny Moments: The Scottish guy. Enough Said.
  Scotty: (in a thick Scottish accent) You shouldnae have come out to play with the big boys, wean, cos you're about to get a proper Scottish welcome!
  (Beat)
  Nate: (confused) I'm sorry?
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Victor "Sully" Sullivan is a fortune hunter who seeks the lost treasure of the Magellan expedition, and partners with Nathan Drake to become an unstoppable duo. Introduced outdoing Nate in professional pickpocketing to lure him to a meet-up, Sully goads Nate into an alliance by preying on Nate's desire to find his long-lost brother Sam. Working with Nate to solve a variety of puzzles and consistently outwit Santiago Moncada, Sully is revealed to have been stringing Nate along in finding Sam, Sully truthfully believing the man to be dead and having just used his memory to manipulate Nate. Nonetheless, Sully proves to be a true friend to Nate, as he sacrifices the Magellan treasure to save his life, and together, the two promise to find their fortune in further adventures.
  • Jo Braddock is the tough-as-nails right-hand woman of Santiago Moncada, and quickly proves herself to be the actual threat betweenst them. Braddock has done all of Santiago's dirty work in finding clues to the Magellan treasure over the years, personally beating Sully in a past encounter and apparently murdering Sam Drake. Using her loyal mercenary outfit to further Santiago's goals, Braddock winds up betraying and murdering Santiago when he outlives his usefulness, Braddock having been using him as a figurehead the whole time. Masterminding a clever, if ridiculous, plot to reap the greatest rewards once she finds the Magellan treasure, Braddock airlifts the Magellan ships and duels Nate and Sully, nearly outwitting and the men to secure her fame and fortune.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Spider-Man is Nathan Drake/Nathan Drake is Spider-Man. ^note Shortly after it was revealed that Tom Holland (who plays Peter Parker/Spider-Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe) would be playing as Nathan Drake, it didn't take long for jokes and comparisons to Spider-Man to be made, which only increased with the official trailer and intensified when the movie came out, due to noted similarities between Tom Holland in his role as Nathan Drake in the film and his role as Spider-Man, even doing a pose somewhat similar to the latter as the former at one point in the trailer. This has quickly led to jokes about them being the same character.
  • Tom Holland Casting. ^note Another common joke after this movie's announcement has been to make mock-ups of other videogame adaptations and put Tom Holland or other ill-fitting young actors as the leads of such films, even joking that he would be playing God of War's Kratos of all characters.
• Moment of Awesome: The climax of the film involves a brawl and dogfight between two pirate ships being SUSPENDED AND CARRIED BY HELICOPTERS. Say what you will about how faithful the movie is to the games, but that is truly a set piece worthy of the Uncharted name.
• Moral Event Horizon: In their first few scenes, Moncada and Braddock don't seem too bad. Moncada is an arrogant man who threatens his rivals, but he is just trying to get back treasure that did belong to his family in the past and is honestly bidding for the key to the treasure. Braddock also seems like a potential Punch-Clock Villain, and the audience only has the word of an Unreliable Expositor for her worst actions. Then they calmly murder Moncada's father so he won't give the family fortune to charity, and eliminate the financing for the treasure hunt.
• One-Scene Wonder: The friendly beach guest, who gets a great Noodle Incident about being in a car that fell out of a plane and is played by Nolan North, is hard to forget in his very short scene.
• Questionable Casting: The biggest issue for a lot of fans and critics is that neither Tom Holland nor Mark Wahlberg were good fits for Nate and Sully. Both are Older Than They Look, so while they're not the wrong ages, both look too young for their respective characters. What's more, neither make any attempt to act like the characters they're playing, instead mostly acting the same as they have in past roles (Tom Holland especially has been accused of playing the role the same way he did with Peter Parker), so even when they're given scenes and lines that are in-character, they deliver them without the personality the characters are supposed to have. It's even more baffling that their performances are like this as Holland and Wahlberg have proven in other movies to have range outside of their most well known roles.
• So Okay, It's Average: It's a run-of-the-mill globe-trotting adventure movie, to the point of feeling like an attempt to deliver the most generic experience imaginable. The fact it's a film adaptation of a video game series isn't working in its favour, either. However, it's not bad nor fails in anything that it's trying to do and is competently made, so other than being overload of clichés and having a few awkward nods to its source material, the movie simply delivers a mild, inoffensive adventure flick that's neither great nor terrible.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Nate and Sully both have significantly different personalities born from their respective actors more-or-less imitating their own past roles (Tom Holland as a naïve young adult à la Spider-Man and Mark Wahlberg as a fast-talking hothead) instead of playing characters that resemble their video game selves. Suffice to say, audiences familiar with the source material weren't pleased with these deviations.
  • Elena is completely absent from the film, even though her relationship with Nate is pivotal to the story of Uncharted. Though it is possible that a future film will rectify this.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The film is set up as a prequel to the games, which isn't necessarily a bad idea as the games firmly establish Nate as an Experienced Protagonist from the beginning and there's quite a bit of backstory teased prior to the first game. However, rather than utilize some of those seeds, the film opts to just come up with a different ^* rehash of the fourth game with elements from the third game as well, only changing some characters' names and set locations adventure all together, leaving that material completely untouched. What's more, the film is completely incompatible with the games' canon, thanks to the changes made to the characters' personalities and backstories, many of which blatantly contradict the lore established in the games. This effectively wastes the prequel premise, as the timeline it uses is clearly an Alternate Continuity.
• The Un-Twist: From the moment we got a look at Tati Gabrielle as Jo Braddock, many Uncharted fans predicted that her character would be revealed to be Nadine Ross at some point in the movie. This doesn't end up happening, although both characters are capable fighters, work for the main antagonist who they eventually betray, and are implied to have had romantic history with Sully. It makes one wonder if the character originally was meant to be Nadine, and her name was changed out of fear for how the fans would react to what would have been a major case of Adaptational Villainy.
• Video Game Movies Suck: The film did poorly with critics (e.g., it has a 41% on Rotten Tomatoes and 45 on Metacritic) and while it fared much better with audiences (with 90% on Rotten Tomatoes and a respectable box office), it's generally thought to be a fun albeit generic adventure movie at best and an underwhelming adaptation of the games at worst.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The entirety of the climax on the two ships deserves mention for the entire scene (barring the obvious scenes involving the actors and sets) being 100% CGI. The entire scene is so well rendered and animated that it's easy to forget that the ships are CGI.
• Woolseyism: In the Brazilian dub, the Scottish mercenary has a thick European Portuguese accent instead, thus preserving the Running Gag of Nate having difficulty in understanding him.

• WTH, Costuming Department?: A rare case of being too accurate. While some of the characters' wardrobes are almost 1-for-1 with the outfits seen in the games (such as Nate's red baseball shirt and Sully's unbuttoned green guayabera and tan pants, both taken from the flashbacks in Drake's Deception), it has the unfortunate side effect of making them look more like cosplayers than people wearing everyday clothing, particularly as the actors themselves look far too different than the characters they're meant to be.

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