Film Review - Uncharted (2022)

Uncharted is based off of the successful series of video games on the Sony Playstation and stars Tom Holland as Nathan Drake a young man working as a bartender who one night meets a man named Sully (Mark Wahlberg) who knew his older brother Sam who went missing looking for a lost fortune of gold said to be worth billions of dollars but the descendant of the original family who found the fortune hundreds of years ago (Antonio Banderas) eyes a mysterious cross that could be the key to finding the lost fortune but Drake and Sully also want that cross so they can find the fortune for themselves.

 

Uncharted was for me not a great film and regrettably after getting off to a good start 2022 has served up its first turkey of a film and firstly I have to start with the films storytelling, it has some fun action scenes such as one with a line of cargo boxes on an aircraft but so often this movie resorts to every 2^nd or 3^rd scene being a double cross, every other line being a sarcastic joke and so many of the actors treating the script with this frivolous tone that I just got so fucking sick of it sitting there watching it in the cinema.

 

Now don’t get me wrong both Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade have humorous moments in them but not to the extent where it undercut the tone of “We have to find this object before the Nazis do or the armies of darkness will march all over the face of the Earth” that those films have, the influence of Joss Whedon in the last 10 years is one that I really really really wish would stop because I’m just that sick of all the cynical frivolousness of many modern movies nowadays where everyone seems to just treat everything like a joke well sir I ain’t laughing,

 

As for the cast well their for the most part either wasted or boring, Tom Holland is a good young actor who has proven himself to be more than capable of carrying a film but this is the second time in a row where the film he’s in doesn’t either seem willing or able to trust him to carry it all on his shoulders and last time it was for nostalgic fanservice this time it feels like he’s in a straitjacket while other characters take the spotlight and I just thought “Piss off you, I want to watch Holland do all this” and when he does get to do some of the puzzle solving its great but there wasn’t enough of it.

 

As for Mark Wahlberg well he’s Mark Wahlberg and he’s becoming another Nic Cage, Jeff Goldblum and Samuel L Jackson where he just plays himself rather than a character and here it’s the usual fast breathing and talking in the Mark Wahlberg voice can you hear it while you reading this because I can hear it while I’ve written this review and in some of the bartender scenes I thought of the 1988 film Cocktail with Tom Cruise and Bryan Brown and I wish that a Bryan Brown type had been cast as Sully instead as someone like that could’ve been the cynic but still have that heart of good and that doesn’t come across in Wahlberg’s work here.

 

As for Antonio Banderas well what a waste of a great talent here being given a thankless role and like Holland tries his best to make it work but the film itself just doesn’t want to let them shine in it, there are 2 ladies here Sophia Ali and Tati Gabrielle and Ali has her moments but again just can’t make anything work in this material and Gabrielle was so forgettable I didn’t really care about her much.

 

And so that was Uncharted and I did not care for this one much I’m afraid, it all just feels like a waste of potential and a waste of a good cast and that’s just sad given what is capable nowadays, 1 out of 5.

 

Film Review - Death on the Nile (2022)

 Death on the Nile is the second Hercule Poirot film to be directed by and star Sir Kenneth Branagh (the first was Murder on the Orient Express back in 2017) and this time Poirot is in Egypt enjoying a holiday when he was tasked with investigating the murder of a wealthy woman (Gal Gadot) who has recently married her fiancé Simon (Armie Hammer) but as always with a murder to solve there are many suspects each with their own alleby’s and possible motives.

 

Death on the Nile I think is a better film than Orient Express was and a lot of that comes down to firstly having a more luxurious location to explore in Egypt and the Nile River than just the snowy mountains and the Orient Express train and also the mystery itself is a better one than the Orient Express film and it allows to get to know Branagh’s take on Poirot more than we did in the previous film.

 

Now Branagh’s take on Poirot is not a patch on Sir David Suchet who was the definitive Hercule Poirot but he is still a good watch in this role and I enjoyed watching him more than I felt the broader ensemble cast, as for Branagh’s direction its okay and he definitely wants to take his time in laying the tracks for this mystery to unfold as well as show off the Egyptian locales and develop his ensemble cast before the killings begin plus there is a very nice Black and White filmed prologue that felt like a bit of a dry run for his current Oscar competitor Belfast.

 

As for that ensemble cast they are okay, Gadot and Hammer play off each other fine enough but they don’t have a lot of romantic chemistry as a couple, Letitia Wright and Sophie Okonedo were good in their roles, I really liked Emma Mackey as the spurned lover and hope to see more of her in future movies while I always enjoy seeing Annette Bening in any role she does.

 

The main highlights of the broader cast however are Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders who make a great pair and generated a good amount of laughs from me while Russell Brand was actually pretty good in this movie and he is someone I’ve never really been a big fan of over the years.

 

And so that was Death on the Nile and its enjoyable enough to make for a watch if you get the chance, 3 out of 5.

Film Review - Moonfall (2022)

 Moonfall is the newest film by Roland Emmerich who you may remember from such films as Independence Day and the Day After Tomorrow and this movie sees Patrick Wilson play a former disgrace NASA astronaut who becomes the point of interest for a local conspiracy theorist (John Bradley) who believes the moon is starting to fall out of its natural orbit with the Earth and will soon crash into it but in order to try and stop it they will need NASAs help and maybe the US Defence department.

 

Moonfall was one of my most anticipated films of this year mainly because Roland Emmerich is a filmmaker that I am a near complete total sucker for, I love Independence Day and the Day After Tomorrow but recently I didn’t care for his Independence Day sequel Resurgence in 2016 or Midway his War film from early 2020 but would this be a case of It’s The End of the World as we Know it and I’ll have fun or more a case of seeing a Bad Moon Rising and trouble on the way.

 

Well happily this is a case of the former as I had a good amount of fun with this movie and while I was watching it I thought to myself “this has a real Independence Day meets the Day after Tomorrow” vibe to it and I enjoyed those films quite a bit and I enjoyed this film as well and had a good time watching it on a good sized cinema screen.

 

The disaster effects in this film first and foremost were a lot of fun combining the Sci-Fi aspect of Independence Day with the Natural Disaster element of the Day After Tomorrow but thankfully not getting too silly or overblown which crippled Emmerich’s 2012 film I felt, there were lots of cool wave effects, gravity shifts, a car chase, news stories that made me think of the last 2 years and even a segment of the film that reminded me of Return of the Jedi.

 

As for the performances well their mostly good, Patrick Wilson is an effective lead while Halle Berry is also pretty good as the chief NASA scientist who comes around to the crazy Moon theories, Donald Sutherland I enjoyed seeing in his brief role while Michael Pena, Charlie Plummer and Kelly Yu were good in their roles as well.

 

Where I think this film falls over sadly is in some of its Sci-Fi storytelling, Emmerich and his writers do a good enough job explaining why the Moon is doing what’s it doing in a very economical kind of a way but they try to add all this other stuff on top of it and it lost me a little bit and felt like the Emmerich of Independence Day: Resurgence where he tried to build this whole other thing on top of what was a simple and economical presence and it didn’t work not there and not here.

 

And so that was Moonfall and its good fun if you’re an Emmerich fan like I am but if your not I would sit this one out, 3 out of 5.