Review: Uncharted treads familiar terrain

It’s New York City. Present day. The scene is a swank bar with low, dusky lighting and sleek-chrome paneling. A bartender, Nate (Tom Holland), trim in a white dress shirt and fitted black vest, thin-lipped but with a twinkle in his eye, rattles a cocktail shaker and contorts his arms to make elaborate pours into shimmering glasses.

His patrons watch him without speaking, a little awestruck — except for one man. Middle-aged, well-built, and looking very much like Mark Wahlberg, he leans against the bar in his black-tie tuxedo and watches Nate work.

“Hey, kid,” the man croons. Nate glances up at him.

“A little too young for a bartender, aren’t you?”

Nate doesn’t miss a beat. “A little too old for the prom, aren’t you?”

The man smiles. Later that night, he intercepts Nate as the restaurant is closing down. “I have a job for you,” he says; this mystery man is under the impression that Nate is not just a mixer of drinks, but something of a hustler. “I don’t know what you think I am,” Nate insists, “but why don’t you just leave?”

The man shrugs. He does go, but when Nate reaches into his back pants’ pocket to retrieve the bracelet that he swiped from a woman customer earlier in the evening, he finds it missing. In its place is a business card with the stranger’s name: Victor “Sully” Sullivan.

Within an hour, Nate has snuck into his new friend’s apartment, where he finds Sully tuxedo-less, wearing nothing but a white tank top. (Once and always a Calvin Klein poster boy — am I right, Mark?) Together, the two men revel over Sully’s fine possessions: an ancient scroll, an elaborate stone figurine… and, most dramatically, the first ever comprehensive map of Earth’s surface — complete with a suggestive dotted line.

“It’s the path that Magellan took to sail around the world,” Nate exclaims. Sully nods, pleased with his eager guest. “You know your history.”

Suffice to say, this intimate scene results in the two men trotting across the globe to uncover a vast fortune in gold that Sr. Magellan is rumored to have lost along the way. The movie is called Uncharted, based on the PlayStation video game series of the same name, but I’ll skip ribbing it over the obvious irony that this type of cinematic journey has been trod many, many times before (Nicholas Cage, anyone?) to focus on a more semantic line of questioning:

Namely, just what is it that’s “uncharted” here? The metaphor doesn’t work when Magellan accomplished the cartographic-lion’s share nearly five hundred years ago; kings, sailors and Indiana Jones have probed the far recesses of civilization in the interim — stolen all of its treasures, too.

Is it gold that represents unexplored terrain for Nate and Sully… or is it each other?

What intrigued me about Uncharted when I first saw its trailer a few months ago was, to my eyes, the sugar-daddy-meets-twink chemistry of its two male leads. Taken as a pair, Holland’s Nate and Wahlberg’s Sully resemble many wealthy, well-groomed gay couples who vacation in far-flung destinations like Mykonos or Tel Aviv. All their scenes together feel plucked out of a romantic comedy (Bogart and Bacall had a similar petty-theft-meet-cute in To Have and Have Not [1944], as did Glen Ford and George Macready in Gilda [‘46]), and their lighthearted bickering is what sparks much of the movie’s jet-fueled trajectory.

Of course, the league of gentlemen filmmakers who came together to make Uncharted represent a distinctly hetero-masculine ethos: nearly all of this movie’s writers and producers have collaborated before on projects like Iron Man (2008), The Dark Knight Rises (‘12), Transformers: The Last Knight (‘17), and Men in Black: International (‘19). But between all the bro-isms — and there are plenty, from Nathan ushering a reluctant Sully into a cramped hiding place (“You can either get shot or have a quick cuddle with me”) to the two arguing over who is taller — Uncharted plays like Romancing the Stone for the “no homo” set.

However, suppressed desire between men is just one of this movie’s antiquated calling cards. Mainstream American movies have long fetishized the exploits of historic European adventurers, from Captain Bligh’s dashing dissenters in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) to Johnny Depp’s grungy-chic Jack Sparrow in the ongoing Pirates of the Caribbean series. Our world has become irrevocably globalized, so the fantasy of “discovery” that fueled imperialist cultures has been left without a clear narrative to take its place — which is why so many big-budget movies occur in outer space nowadays (e.g. Star Wars, the various Marvel franchises, etc).

Uncharted participates in this mega-retro, conquistador-centric pageantry to the nth degree — featuring a scheming Spaniard (Antonio Banderas), cryptic clues left by ancient fraternities, and a climactic battle between two five-hundred-year-old ships. This final image is almost touching in its willful impossibility: the rotting, gold-filled vessels are lifted out of a cave via helicopters, and as they soar above a Philippine jungle our Old World-randy heroes swing from ropes and swashbuckle their way to self-fulfillment. (“I’ve dreamed about this my whole life!” Nate shouts.)

The rip-roaring adventure is a crucial genre of Western, patriarchal society — useful not just because it presents colonialism as a fun game, but because it’s a means of depicting close inter-male relationships while denying the possibility of homosexuality. This is true of Mutiny on the Bounty, in which Clark Gable and Franchot Tone share a curious scene where they eat bananas under a palm tree, before ending up with Tahitian wives, and it’s true of Uncharted. Screenwriters Rafe Lee Judkins, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway throw in a few caveats to ensure that heterosexuality is never fully out of sight: Sully is implied to have slept with one of the movie’s two women characters, Jo (Tati Gabrielle), while Nate undergoes a will-they-or-won’t-they subplot with its second, Chloe (Sophia Ali).

Yet even these “romantic” arrangements are undercut by the writers’ misogynistic, racist tone: Jo, a Black woman, is also the villain, while Chloe is a duplicitous colleague of Middle Eastern-descent who threatens the white boys’ dreams by going after the treasure herself. In the end, Nate and Sully leave Jo to drown in the ocean, flying their helicopter into the sunset as a bikini-clad Chloe rolls her eyes at them from a speedboat. Don’t worry, the film assures us, Nate will mate with his sour arm candy in the sequel… but for now, enjoy this closeup of him handing Sully a phallic gold piece that he lifted from the pirate ship.

It’s a little wearying to watch yet another action movie pose at machismo while cruising on the homoeroticism of its male leads — but then again, I’m not sure I want an out-and-proud Uncharted. It’s only a matter of time before Hollywood greenlights an openly gay male movie star — and when it does, that man’s gayness will be co-opted to push postcolonial sentimentality just as assuredly as Clark Gable did eighty-seven years ago, and as Tom Holland, the biggest movie star in the world, is doing today.