Infuriatingly sloppy and intensely awful, Eli Roth’s hopelessly derivative Borderlands is scraping below the bottom of the barrel when it comes to video game adaptations. Even given a property with a lot of potential for cinematic mayhem, an all star cast, and a seemingly large amount of resources to pull from, Borderlands still succumbs to tedium and grating cliches at every turn. When critics say that many bad video game adaptations feel like watching someone else playing while the viewer waits their turn, they’re talking about Borderlands, a nonsensical assembly of sequences that feel like bad cut scenes and quick time events rather than anything remotely resembling entertainment.
Opening with an insanely long exposition dump that’s thankfully easy to understand, Borderlands launches into an Escape from New York styled story set in a Manalorian universe with the character structure of a Guardians of the Galaxy film. Dangerous, anti-social, and capable bounty hunter Lilith (Cate Blanchett) has been hired by the most powerful industrialist in the galaxy (Edgar Ramírez) to find his daughter, Tina (Ariana Greenblat), a teenager with a lineage that can help him unlock a hidden treasure trove of ancient alien technology people have attempted to locate for eons. It’s made out to look like she has run away, but really she’s being protected by a former soldier of the royal guard (Kevin Hart) and a hulking, mask wearing bodyguard (Florian Munteanu). Lilith has no choice but to begrudgingly accept the job, even if it means returning to her old home planet of Pandora, a – you guessed it – wasteland of thieves, scum, and villainy.
Borderlands – with a script from Roth and Joe Crombie that’s the definition of unusable – moves with all the thrills of reading an instruction manual and pops with dialogue that sounds appropriately like it’s straight out of a video game. That’s not a compliment when that should be read as “sounds stilted and like it has been run through Google translate eight or nine times.” It’s almost like the movie’s characters are waiting for on screen prompts to switch weapons or press a button at a specific moment. Since Borderlands isn’t an interactive movie – the one thing that could make any of this remotely interesting by way of a gimmick – the whole thing is a pandering piece of trash that suggests gamers won’t go to the movies unless they’re given something that acts like its also a game. Borderlands is a feature length tutorial for a game that never arrives.
The characters go around collecting a bunch of cosmic keys to unlock the big McGuffin, en route to a reveal that will shock positively no one, whether they’ve played the game or not. They also do things that make positively no sense, because if they ever once thought for a second or did things with a sense of strategy, the film would be over in a matter of minutes. Everyone preens around in a variety of mismatched costumes (which, to be fair, is part of the appeal of the game) that gives distinct Hot Topic cosplay chic, but the attire and hairstyling is about all the actors are given to work with because there’s nothing else to these people other than the situation.
Blanchett gets the most to work with, and although this is far and away the worst thing she has ever appeared in, she’s trying her best to look like there’s some fun to be had. Or maybe all the character’s snark is just the least she could do. The same could be said for Jamie Lee Curtis, who comes in around the halfway mark as a math and science whiz that doesn’t do much other than explain how the rest of the film is going to go. Hart is phoning things in here for the most part, but he does have one unusually touching scene involving a stuffed animal that’s arguably better than anything else in the movie. Greenblat is an annoyance throughout, not just because the character is meant to be chaotic, but because Tina is written creepily like a sexualized four year old pyromaniac and not like an older person. Then there’s the case of Jack Black, who provides the voice of a robot that eagerly follows and annoys Lilith throughout her journey. It’s another thing that exists only in video games to provide even more exposition, but it might get a couple of chuckles out of teens and the younger crowd.
Everyone here is distressingly overqualified for something this awful, including Roth, who even at his worst is able to display a panache and energy that’s entirely absent here. Borderlands belongs in the rarified same class of video game movies as House of the Dead, Double Dragon, Tekken, and Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, but that fact that it takes so many talented people down with it makes this arguably worse. Also, those movies had fun moments because of their baffling awfulness. There’s nary a scrap of fun to be found in Borderlands.
Borderlands is now playing in theatres everywhere.
