Uncharted Review: 4 Ups & 6 Downs

5. The Lazy, Dull Script

It does the entire cast no favours at all that the script, penned by The Wheel of Time showrunner Rafe Judkins and Iron Man writers Art Marcum and Matt Holloway, feels so mechanical and witless.

Effectively a grab-bag of adventure movie cliches, Uncharted underlines the issue with adapting a video game that is itself so thoroughly influenced by classic movie yarns like Indiana Jones.

This film feels like somebody watched the Indy movies and mainlined all the Uncharted games over the course of a week and then frantically scrawled this mess out in a few days.

Awash in soul-sappingly tedious expository dialogue, lousy comic relief, and generic breadcrumb-following nonsense at the expense of meaningful character development, there's very little clever about this screenplay.

Nate and Sully's various grifts and schemes are weirdly low-energy and unimaginative, and to the surprise of nobody who actually plays video games, attempting to translate the puzzle-solving elements of Uncharted into something engagingly cinematic is much harder than it looks.

This film could've overcome its blatant miscasting with a solid script, but it's so aggressively piecemeal and devoid of effort.