Warning: This article contains major spoilers for the Uncharted movie.
The Uncharted movie played true to action-adventure tropes by bringing a minimal cast filled with characters who vied for an elusive treasure. Tom Holland’s role as Nathan Drake sees him team up with Mark Wahlberg’s Victor Sullivan as the pair look to defy their enemies by reaching the prize first.
An outline such as this requires characters to be on top of their game when it comes to planning, execution, and survival, which was displayed by everyone in the main cast. With a sequel likely to follow, it’s worth rounding up the feats and achievements where intelligence is concerned in this movie to understand how the characters’ mindsets worked.
Santiago Moncada
Calling Moncada a generic evil villain is a good way to sum up his personality in Uncharted, as he had no role other than to dole out monologues. Moncada thought himself to be a shrewd planner, yet he turned out to be something of a chump who was played by all his men.
Braddock was revealed to be using Moncada’s resources the whole time without him realizing it, with Moncada getting killed off while he was in the middle of another one of his villainous rants. All things considered, Moncada had a mentality too simplistic to survive in such a duplicitous environment as in the movie’s universe.
Scotty
His hard Scottish accent has brought in many memes from Uncharted fans at his expense, and Scotty played into the brutish thug trope. He wasn’t one who could think for himself, relying exclusively on Braddock’s orders for him to know what he was supposed to do.
Scotty wasn’t quick-witted enough either to understand how the smaller but more agile Nate fought, which got him embarrassed multiple times. In the end, his lack of smarts proved to be his downfall when he was stupid enough to fly the enormous chopper he was commandeering into a mountain.
Samuel Drake
Sam was of the crafty variety, in that he knew how to slip in and out of situations with minimal resources. While he wasn’t unintelligent, his optimism was too much for Sam to use his mind and he ended up being caught and sent to jail for years while the smarter Sully escaped.
Sam only showed up in flashbacks for the movie’s events until the stinger revealed he was in prison, but the fact that he couldn’t escape his captivity proves that he isn’t as crafty as he appeared to be. Still, he deserves credit for the way he figured out clues to the treasure and slyly sent Nate clues to decipher.
Chloe Frazer
Chloe is among the most intelligent Uncharted characters in the games, which was partially adapted to the movies. Chloe was better than anyone else in winning a person’s trust just to betray them, but she was also not shown to be smart enough to decipher puzzles by herself.
Chloe got fooled by Nate to go after coordinates that didn’t really exist, which established that she wasn’t as cunning as the main heroes were shown to be. On the other hand, her ability to dupe just about any one time and again is a slick ability that points toward her quick-witted nature.
Jo Braddock
Braddock was similar to the villains found in the best Uncharted games released yet, being similar to Atoq Navarro and Nadine Ross where she proved to be powerful and a trickster who used her benefactor’s resources until the time was right to usurp their authority.
Braddock had a brilliant plan of keeping track of the heroes’ progress to then swoop in and claim the treasure for herself, which would have worked had Nate and Sully not destroyed the treasure altogether. She wasn’t all that smart when it came to one-on-one clashes, as Braddock was outsmarted each time by the heroes, including her eventual defeat.
Victor Sullivan
Sully wasn’t the paternal figure in the film as he is in the games, although his survivalist mentality appears more or less the same. Sully knew which person to use at which point, having earlier partnered with Sam and later sought out Nate when the latter could be useful to him.
Sully never got himself into a position to get caught because his smarts enabled him to play everyone else around him to his benefit. He was relatively hopeless when it came to deciphering the puzzles, which takes a bit away from his feats of intelligence, but Sully had the best ideas when it came to escape with his life intact.
Nathan Drake
Nate was perhaps the most naive character in the movie, but he was also by no means unintelligent. In fact, he was the one who figured out where the treasure was based on complex clues by Sam and figuring out things that nobody else could see. Moreover, he had the sneaky mentality needed to slip away the way others like Sully and Chloe did.
Nate caught on to how the characters worked, evolving his thinking process to ensure that he didn’t get fooled by Sully or Chloe after they initially turned on him. Apart from his innocent nature, Nate had the required skills to uncover clues and hints, along with coming up with crafty ways to fight enemies to ensure he walked away as the winner.
