#victorsullivan

This won’t be a movie review since I don’t think I care enough for this movie to actually spend time commenting technical matters such as plot, photography, acting and so on. It was an average film, that’s all: action-packed, some intense moments, true to the over-the-top situations which are the Uncharted trademark. I actually found it entertaining, all in all, although it had obvious issues.

However, that’s not the point of this post. What really bothers me about this film is how they have completely butchered and mishandled the characters – or rewritten already-existing characters (let’s just forget the half-baked “Rafe” and “Nadine”, ‘aight?).

Again, I wouldn’t care if it was just your average action movie. But it’s not – it’s a movie based on an existing franchise and for all crying out loud that a movie is different from a videogame and needs different pacing, storyline and angle, I can’t justify the total disservice they did to most of the characters.

Especially Victor “Goddamn” Sullivan.

[From now on: when I say “Victor” I’m referring to the movie version; when I say “Sully” I’m talking about the videogame version. Same goes for Nathan/Nate.]

Let’s set one thing straight, for starters: Nathan Drake is not the movie’s main issue here, even though he seems a washed-down impersonation of Peter Parker (it hurts to write this, because I actually liked Tom Holland throughout the Marvel movies and in all the ones before them, but he just seems stuck in that role afterwards).

Anyway, he still holds Nathan’s role fairly well. I just felt his humor was a bit off-time and more of an attempt at Nate’s original sass, but he’s impersonating the same role we know from the videogames: the charismatic, sometimes dorky protagonist with a knack for adrenaline. It lacked something, but it wasn’t a bad Nathan Drake.

Shout out to the young actors, by the way: they did an amazing job with young!Sam and young!Nate ♥

The only thing that didn’t hold well is the fact that in Uncharted (UC from now on) 1 to 3 it all starts as a treasure hunt and ends up with some bigger reason to find the artefact/treasure – usually saving the world, talk about dramatic – establishing that Nate has a hero complex. In UC 4 there’s no save-the-world twist, but his main motive was saving his brother Sam, so it still wasn’t something solely about riches and wealth.

Here, it’s just about the money and the fact that he’s doing it “for his brother” (meaning he wished they found the treasure together, so he pursued the hunt alone). It is a rather feeble motivation that didn’t really help me sympathizing with the character. Not every movie needs a moral, but the lack thereof is definitely not a plus.

Back to Victor, I can’t believe they chose to handle him in this way. I don’t even know where to start, so I’ll just say it: I hate the character. I would’ve hated him in the games too, if he acted like Wahlberg’s character acts. Back-stabbing, manipulative, greedy, insensitive and self-centered. What’s in there to like, really?

Moreover, and that’s really the root of the problem, if there’s one thing that’s been made very clear throughout the games, it’s that Sully is trustworthy and reliable – at least when it comes to Nate. That’s not something I’m making up or deducing by what’s been shown: it is openly stated more than once in different games.

The proofs? Here ya go – just the couple of times this specific trait of his gets mentioned out loud, mind you.

Uncharted 1: “Sully is a lot of things, but he’s not a back-stabber.”

Uncharted 4: “Have you even thought about a back-up plan in case Sullivan gets cold feet?” “No, because he won’t.”

Sully’s loyalty gets actually mentioned twice in this scene: “Yes, he’s double-crossed people in the past. But not us.” “No. Not you”. I find this reiteration particularly interesting.

At the end of the day, Sully is a thief, a criminal and likes to trick people for his own gain. But not Nate. I can’t stress enough how important this point is for his character. You can still show he is a jerk (and the game does a good job in showing he has a plethora of enemies around), while not necessarily have him double-cross nate.

By the way, don’t even get me started about the times he indirectly says or shows he cares about Nate and his well-being – that’s basically every line he utters when he’s your sidekick. I can still hear his “watch it, kid” when you climb at mortal heights.

So… betraying Nathan? Never in a million years, right? Yet, that’s exactly what the movie shows us. As I already said, I’m okay with rewriting the characters, if necessary, but this is character annihilation. When you adapt something, no matter how hard and deep the rewriting and restyling is, there are still going to be fixed roles you can and will associate to the original work. We look for the familiar and known and you can’t ignore this fact when writing such a movie.

So, about the roles.

As I said, Nathan Drake is the hero. Check. Moncada/Rafe is the main antagonist. Check-ish (if that was supposed to be a Rafe-like character, they missed out on him. Big time). Chloe is the sidekick. Double check (I really liked her!). Braddock/Nadine is the second antagonist. Check-ish (she was clearly supposed to fit Nadine’s shoes in the whole auction/mercenary scenario, but I have the same issues with her as with Moncada).

Victor Sullivan… who is he supposed to be? Friend? Mentor? Accomplice? Father figure? He really doesn’t fit any of this roles, not really, not completely and that’s not because he’s a multi-faceted character. This change in perspective doesn’t even make sense from a narrative point: it doesn’t add anything, it just makes Victor come off as an as*hole who gets away with his wrongdoings.

I’m sorry, but any excuses for Victor’s behavior in the movie are just that: excuses. You’re not creating a character from scratch, you’re reinventing a character that has to maintain his core qualities and characteristics (hence “character”, geddit?) to be recognizable. Here, he doesn’t even have a mustache that could at least make him visually pass for Sully – which is really the least bothering thing about him.

And it does bother me, because if this was meant to be an “origin story”, there’s no sensible reason, apart from fan-service, to have Victor suddenly grow out a mustache and smoke a cigar in a post-credit scene.

But back to topic… It’s time for some backtracking, to highlight why movie Victor doesn’t work on multiple levels.

You’re reinventing a character which has always and only been on Nate’s side. Not even once there was an ounce of doubt on his loyalty (save from UC1 where Elena rightly has her concerns about him and Nate quickly dismisses them).

In UC3, before they even joined up or knew each other, Sully tries to protect him from Marlowe and he’s totally enraged when she slaps him in the museum. He throws away his allegiance to her to save Nate and accepts the burden of caring for a 14yo (and supposedly his brother) who basically ruined his gig and compromised his relationship with a wealthy client.

And still, he chooses Nathan – because Sully, other than being a goddamn motherfucker, is a good man at heart. He cares about him, even if maybe he didn’t even mean to in the first place, but he does and keeps on caring for the following 20 years and beyond.

Hell, he even says he feels like a father figure to him (UC3) and he wishes he can do right by him. I mean, if this is not a display of unadulterated affection, I don’t know what is. By the way, UC3 shows us that Nate’s biggest fear is losing Sully, both with how reckless he gets when he thinks Sully’s been kidnapped, and with his harrowing hallucination in Ubar/Iram – I didn’t cry like a baby during the first playthrough, of course I didn’t.

Let’s go on: he is the only reasonable one during the events of UC4. He could prompt Nate to go on with the hunt for Avery’s treasure and instead he tells him rather harshly that he should talk to his wife and be honest with her – and still supports him (reproachingly) when he chooses not to. He’s conflicted, but he tries his hardest to be supportive, knowing that Nate is already having a hard time with Sam’s return and guilt-tripping. He makes mistakes, but he does what a good father would do, period.

We don’t have any of that in the movie, not even hints of what their bond could become in the future. We don’t have any of the qualities that made Sully a likeable character in the games.

Not only Victor doesn’t give a s*it about Nathan as a person… he is even partly responsible for his brother’s death. That wouldn’t be a problem (even if I have my issues about how they handled Sam’s “death”), if he didn’t lie to Nathan about it throughout half the movie only because he needed him.

Furthermore, he acted like it was totally normal to leave someone for dead and run away. I mean, it is normal in his line of work, but you’re talking to his little brother and you’re just telling him that Sam has been dead for two years. How do you think he’s going to react? Oh, right, he forgets about it around twenty minutes later, my bad.

See what I mean with “annihilated characters”? It’s not even bad rewriting, it’s bad writing.

Uncharted is not a realistic series by any means, but it does have realistic human interactions. Take those away, and you kill the whole franchise. If we’re going to stick to some sort of realism here, I can’t even begin to imagine how Victor and Nathan could fix a relationship that had never even existed in the first place. In the movies, they’ve known each other for a few days, a couple weeks, tops.

I can buy into a fast-growing close relationship in this span of time in the original UC universe. Sully saved Nate’s life in Cartagena – this sort of thing is bound to drive someone closer to his savior, if only out of gratitude (and Nathan isn’t even too keen on that after the deed. He’s very suspicious of Sully, and rightly so).

Apart from this… he’s a 14yo kid. Orphan. Living day to day (have you noticed how famished he acts when Sully offers him food?) Probably traumatized by a near-death experience. With a fairly absent brother – yes, absent, try me and explain how the hell an underage kid ended up in Colombia in the 90s (cartel wars, anyone?) without his only parental figure. So, yeah, I can buy into this sort of character growing attached to Sully, an experienced treasure hunter who clearly could teach him a thing or two.

I can’t do the same in this movie. How and why a grown-up Nathan should establish a father-son relationship with Victor? Especially after discovering he’s been used as a puppet to find the treasure and lied to, repeatedly. This is a rift between the two that can’t ever be fixed, no matter how hard Victor tries.

Even if we find out in the sequel (?) that he knew his brother was in jail and lied for whatever reason, it would still be that kind of (double) lie that would undermine their trust forever.

Good-ish friends? Yeah, that could work.

Partners in crime? Fair enough, as long as they both keep an eye on each other.

Parental bond? Ugh, I really struggle to imagine Nathan seeing Victor as a father – or the latter seeing the former as his son. It has some degree of toxic that doesn’t sit well with me.

Again: Nathan is not a kid anymore. There’s no reason Victor should stick around for him when it’s clear that he can handle himself. Also, Nathan seems to have spent his whole teenage years at the orphanage, as opposed to canon, where he leaves at the age of 12 with his brother, who is barely 18 at the time. Different situations beg for different character development and different relationships between people. While I can’t say I find Victor and Nathan’s relationship healthy, even as partners in crime, I can see the studio was aiming for a different dynamic, where Nathan has had a somewhat more stable life and the age gap between the two was not enough to suggest Victor could be a parental figure.

The core problem here is that Nate and Sully’s father-son relationship is what holds the videogames together in the first place – along with Elena’s role, I don’t want to diminish her in any way and I only have good words for her, but luckily they decided not to butcher her character for now. Take the wholesome Sully-Nate dynamic away and… why do you even have a Victor Sullivan in the first place?

TLDR; So… yeah, I’m saying movie’s Victor is NOT Uncharted’s Sully. Not even remotely. I can’t wrap my head around how bad they handled him. Even if he were a completely new character, I couldn’t find one single redeeming quality in him. It’s like they tried a half-assed version of John Silver and Jim’s relationship in Treasure Planet and miserably failed at it. FYI the scene where Victor saves Nathan on the chopper is kind of a rip-off from the Disney movie – same dynamic, same choice between money and protégé.

Only, Disney knew what they were doing. This movie clearly didn’t.