Joe Carnahan has a lot on his plate as he writes X-Force and gets ready to direct the third Bad Boys movie, but he recently managed to finish working on the script for the long-delayed Uncharted movie. Asked about that in a recent interview, the filmmaker confirmed that while he hasn't lifted any of the game's impressive action set pieces out of those for Shawn Levy's big screen take on the property, he did dream up four huge new ones which should bring a smile to the faces of fans.
"I probably wrote four of the biggest, f***in’ craziest action sequences I think I’ve ever written in that movie," Carnahan told Coming Soon. "I used the Uncharted games as a template but not using any one specifically, because those sequences have already been done beautifully. There’s no point in just transposing them to film, you’ve gotta come up with new shit, so that’s what I did. It was a great challenge but it was a lot of fun."
Given his action experience, that sounds like a lot of fun, but what should we expect from the story? Understandably, Carnahan wouldn't go into specifics, but he did indicate that this could be a pretty grown uptake on the beloved video game property thanks to the dialogue he's written.
"When I wrote Uncharted, I didn’t spare the rod. I wrote it the way the video game is. They swear in the game, they’re kinda foul-mouthed and I kept all that stuff intact and I definitely didn’t write it as a “PG-13” movie, I wrote it the way that movie should be written. I never understood the metric for, ‘This will make X-amount more if it were PG-13.’ PG-13 in a lot of ways is a cop out, and I think it’s been exposed as such."
That's no doubt a reference to the success of movies like Kingsman: The Secret Service and Deadpool and it will be interesting to see what direction Sony now decides to take. Chances are they'll tone down the language to make this a PG-13 summer blockbuster, but an R-Rated take could actually be just what the struggling video game movie genre needs at this stage. We'll just have to wait and see, but here's hoping Uncharted manages to escape the curse which plagues these adaptations...