There are plenty of bad video game movies in existence. There are also, especially recently, plenty of good ones, and even plenty of ones that are bad in interesting ways. For every good or mediocre one, we get something bizarre or filled with weird ambition that doesn’t work. “Borderlands” is none of those things. It’s not good, and it certainly isn’t filled with misunderstood creative ambition. It’s just simply very bad.
The film follows Lilith, played by Cate Blanchett (“Tár,” “Ocean's 8”), a bounty hunter sent by corporate CEO Atlas, played by Edgar Ramírez (“Hand of Stone,” “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story”), to the wasteland planet of Pandora to rescue his daughter Tiny Tina, played by Ariana Greenblatt (“65,” “Barbie”), after she was kidnapped by a rogue soldier Roland, played by Kevin Hart (“Ride Along,” “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle”), and murderous psycho Krieg, played by Florian Munteanu (“Creed II,” “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”). Along the way, Lilith also finds herself stuck with the malfunctioning and annoying robot Claptrap, voiced by Jack Black (“School of Rock,” “Kung Fu Panda”), and the insane Dr. Tannis, played by Jamie Lee Curtis (“Halloween (1978),” “Everything Everywhere All At Once”), and the group of misfits try to find a legendary vault, said to contain vast amounts of wealth and weapons, before Atlas.
Directed by Eli Roth (“Hostel,” “Thanksgiving”) and written by Roth and Craig Mazin (“Chernobyl,” “The Last of Us (2023)”), “Borderlands” is a film for no one, plain and simple. Roth’s style and expertise with gore and horror films seems wasted here, as the movie ends up coming across as a generic action movie with no real sense of style or uniqueness. The script likewise shoehorns in a lot of plot and cool sounding terminology that amounts to a lot of macguffins getting tossed around and very little in the way of actual characterization or emotional arcs.
You could say that the cast is doing the best they can with what they’ve been given, but they all mostly feel like they’re wandering around, like lost puppies in search of an owner. Blanchett is the strongest of them, mostly just due to the sheer charisma and strength of her acting talents. Hart is simply miscast, as his funny man wisecracking abilities don’t fit a strait-laced serious military man archetype. Greenblatt takes a role clearly meant to be silly and immature into something insanely annoying, and Curtis seems just simply lost, as if she wandered onto set and got forced into participating. As for Ramírez, when the film remembers that he exists, he’s simply a generic bad guy with little personality and even less memorability. The few bright spots come from Black’s vocal performance, which is thankfully one of the few moments the film’s over-the-top sense of humor works, and Munteanu, who simply works as a massive pile of hulking muscle, spouting non-sequitur lines as showpieces for his own madness.
Given the film was shot back in 2021 and delayed for almost two years, even before reshoots began, you’d at least expect a film with a $120 million price tag to look nice. It certainly had the time and budget for it, but “Borderlands” fluctuates between looking painfully average and terrible. Some sets and shots look fine enough, if exceedingly cheap. It’s the kind of film that is stuffed to the gills with knick-knacks all over the place as if to hide the cheapness of it all, sometimes even looking like an above average fan film or theme park location. Then there are also the numerous gunfights and explosive action sequences that just look unfinished, plain and simple.
Not only that, but the film seems to play fast and loose with the series’ lore in a way that will be confusing to newcomers and frustratingly dull for fans of the games. Yes, not every video game adaptation needs to stick religiously to the material of the games, but Mazin and Roth have crafted a story that can sometimes be painfully overexplained and then later intelligible to only those familiar with the difference between a skag and a bullymong. Even the film’s sense of “insanity” comes across as painfully watered down, reduced to a barrage of “well that happened” level jokes and constant references to its characters’ seemingly nonexistent “major issues.”
To add the cherry on top of this dumpster fire, the film was also shot as an R-rated affair to keep in line with the games’ mature tone, but then later edited to be PG-13. Normally, this wouldn’t be worth mentioning if it wasn’t painfully obvious that this was the case. Any casual observer could see the out of place visual effects cuts and overlays to hide the intensity of the violence, and it just seems really weird to see a movie so full of legitimate gunfire (not laser blasters or pseudo-science-fiction weaponry) with nary a bloodspurt in sight.
It’s kind of fascinating to find a film as bad as “Borderlands,” a film adaptation of a game series that’s sold over 75 million copies and yet somehow made for no one. The acting is serviceable to bad, the writing is poor and fluctuates between confusing or boring the viewer, and it doesn’t even manage to look good despite a long post-production period. It’s a maddening film in that it can’t even be bad in an interesting way. It’s just a boring, bad, bland action film wearing the skin of a popular IP to lackluster results. Maybe this film is what drove everyone on Pandora insane. 1/5
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