Screenshot: Detective Pikachu/Warner Bros.
The Tom Holland/Mark Wahlberg adaptation of the Uncharted video game series is out this week, riffing on Indiana Jones with a modern young protagonist. It’s one of my favorite game franchises, which by no means guarantees I’ll enjoy the movie. Movies and shows based on video games have a deservedly spotty reputation; Rotten Tomatoes isn’t everything, but with only a couple of exceptions, their review scores tend to top out somewhere in the 50% range. (Uncharted is currently sitting at a cool 42%.)
Not to be dismissive, but there’s no question that we’re grading on a curve assembling a “best” list of video game movies—we have a tendency to describe particularly well-made video games as “cinematic,” which suggests that the medium’s highest goal should be to evolve itself to become as movie-like as possible. That is silly: they’re very different things, and what works for one often fails the other. As a result, some of the most straightforward game adaptations fail for trying too hard to replicate the source material.
Some of the best are ports of action-heavy fighting games that know exactly what they’re about. An adaptation of Street Fighter probably isn’t going to win a lot of Oscars, but, done right, it might be the perfect diversion. These particular adaptations all work as perfectly watchable entertainment, if for very different reasons.
