I'm a total sucker for Tom Holland and here he goes again, just charming his way through a movie and elevating it simply by his presence. I mean, I've never played any of the Uncharted series (something I do aim to address, one day), but I wouldn't say that Holland is the obvious pick for Nathan Drake. He's young, definitely, though this is going for a bit of a prequel vibe, but it's more that he isn't rough enough around the edges; he feels too much of a good guy to be a thief. I feel like a Matt Ryan (a la Constantine) or an Oscar Isaac might have been more obvious. And yet... I don't care. Holland is great; his physicality works really well and you certainly wind up rooting for him, plus you can tell he's having a great time with it all.

As for the rest of the film, it's possibly the most video-game movie I've seen yet. There are sequences that felt like I was watching a cutscene. Part of that is the slightly janky CGI (at times), but it's more just the way they are directed, and the beats that they follow. Subtle things like how a scene is frame, or the free-floating cameras with slow pan reveals, or even just the way an item is moved towards the camera, in an almost 3D-film way, all felt like something I'd expect in a videogame sequence, but which felt out of place in a film. To be clear, that's not a criticism! When your movie ends with mid-air pirate ship battles as the lost boats of the Magellan expedition are literally flown around tethered to helicopters, complete with still-working cannons (and wood that has clearly been blessed by some Filipino gods to stay intact, despite the utterly decrepit condition), then leaning into the videogame vibe just makes sense to me. It helps you to just roll with the ridiculous narrative punches coming your way, and completely left me wanting to pick up a controller and sink some time into a few missions.

Which is all to say that Uncharted is a dumb film with a solid cast, decent direction, good pacing, and stupidly fun action sequences, in the vein of the Indian Jones and Tomb Raider franchises that came before it (the first variations of both of those, to be clear). It's campy, funny, a little bit clunky at times, and it feels like every single person on set was having a complete blast, which means that so did I.