I really hemmed and hawed about whether the new Tom Holland movie would be appropriate for my eight-year-old and 11-year-old. That the movie is effectively being marketed to them by starring the erstwhile Spider-Man, who could reasonably be considered the most popular actor for kids under 12 (he's my kids' favorite actor), is helpful, but only in a limited sense. If I used that logic take my kids to The Devil All the Time and Cherry, that would have been a disaster.
I also didn't have any real knowledge of the video game, except that it was in the same realm as Indiana Jones in terms of its swashbuckling and seeking of treasure. I remember everyone always said the cut scenes were really great. Was it one of those game where when the characters died, they died bloody? I didn't know.
I did, however, have a person in my Flickchart Facebook group say "Ehhh probably?" when I asked if it was appropriate for kids that age. (He's an American critic and he saw the film earlier in the week.) He likened the level of violence to that of a Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and indeed, that seemed fine for them.
Because I also wanted to make this my first review on ReelGood next week, I brushed aside any remaining qualms and took them on Friday night.
We ran into a problem at Uncharted, but it didn't have anything to do with the movie itself. It was the same problem we ran into at Spider-Man: No Way Home -- exactly the same, in fact, which I wrote about in this post. The two movies whose trailers horrified my eight-year-old at that viewing -- Morbius and The Batman -- still have not come out, so sure enough, we got those trailers again. The difference this time was that I was the one in charge of helping my son avoid any visual or auditory input from them, where my wife did it last time. (She was not present for our Uncharted viewing.) My heart went out to that poor boy, seeing the intensity with which he closed his eyes and covered his ears, and it was clear he wanted more than his own meager body parts could accomplish. So during the Batman trailer I also sung a little funny song right next to his ear, so that was all he could hear, and not the punches, screams or scraping metal. (He later on told my wife he had "averted his eyes" during these trailers. I had no idea he knew the word "averted.")
To my great delight, the violence level in Uncharted was perfect, probably even better than Spider-Man. There was only one part that wigged out my son a little bit, when a character gets his throat slit. That sounds like a lot to take in, but the way it was staged was comically tame. Yes, this man dies almost immediately from his injuries, but one really wonders why, given that the only sign of his fatal wound is a red line on his neck about the thickness of a Sharpie -- not the freshets of blood that flow from such a wound in reality and lead to death pretty quickly. Pretty sure this guy could have walked away from this one, and maybe even kept his appointments later in the day.
There was, however, one part of the movie that bothered my son ever so slightly, something I only knew because I asked him about it.
The profanity level is pretty tame in this movie too, with maybe one or two "son of a bitch"es and I'm sure some "hell"s and "damn"s scattered in there, though at this point those words pretty much go in one ear and out the other. Seeking to give the film some sort of edge, though, they went to the "shit" well quite a lot. "Shit" is the perfect form of profanity to pay a compliment to the aspirational viewers in the audience without really offending younger viewers.
So I don't know if my younger son was offended, but he certainly did notice.
After about 15 minutes I turned to him and said "Are they using the S-word enough for you?"
"They've said it six times," he retorted, without missing a beat.
I had to contain my hysterical laughter so as not to bother the people around me in the mostly full theater.
I secretly hoped he would keep counting. The movie didn't make that task easy. When I asked him near the end if he had kept track, he said he hadn't, but he suspected it was in the vicinity of 25 times. That sounded right.
Well, the movie was a huge hit with them. It wasn't with me, but I don't care about that. My older son proclaimed it his favorite movie ever -- what a surprise -- and the younger didn't make any such assessment but was eager to talk about how Holland was his favorite actor. When my older son asked me what I thought about, I was honest, though I probably softened it a bit just because I knew how strongly he felt. I tried to explain that he hadn't seen movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark and so had nothing to compare it to. Of course, Raiders is only the movie I name check in this scenario because I hadn't seen the older movies that inspired Raiders, which my dad would have championed with me in this same situation.
In truth, if Uncharted were the first movie of its kind you had seen -- which I suspect it was for these guys -- then it would deliver the goods well enough for you, especially if you didn't have the high standards of a film critic. (As for Raiders, well, that's still a long way off. I might have seen it for the first time around my younger son's age, but the Nazi face-melting definitely requires several more years of maturation.)
I'll close by saying I was really encouraged to see our theater almost full. In fact, by leaving it until the last minute to buy tickets, I actually flirted with losing out on tickets entirely -- completely unheard of in the COVID era. We had to rush over from our dinner at the neighboring pancake restaurant to get there before the trailers started -- trailers my younger son would have been just as happy to avoid -- and the three tickets I purchased in the front row were the only three available that were next to each other. We could have sat scattered, but that doesn't make it very easy to share popcorn and Skittles -- nor to cover your son's eyes and ears when the trailers are too intense.
So yeah, audiences will still go to the movies and in fact, they seem eager to. We've had some COVID restrictions lifted this week, so maybe we're finally getting back to a time when the cinemas won't feel in constant jeopardy of going under.
In the end, the eight-year-old -- who had expressed major concern about being so close to the screen, both for visual reasons and because he thought it would be louder -- said that sitting in the front row turned out just fine. He wasn't bothered by it at all.
Just like he wasn't bothered by the 25 shits, though he certainly did notice them.
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