Director: Eli Roth
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Edgar Ramírez, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu, Jamie Lee Curtis
Runtime: 102 minutes
Rating: 1.5 / 5
The annals of Hollywood film archives are filled with the graves of failed video game adaptations. Although there have been some occasional successes (HBO’s “The Last of Us” and Universal Pictures’s “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” come to mind), most range from ‘meh’ (“Sonic the Hedgehog”, 2001’s “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider”) to mind-boggling awful (the original “Super Mario Bros.”, which apparently was such a disaster during filming that the film’s stars turned to drinking to get through it). So with such a poor track record, you need a really talented filmmaker with an excellent idea to make sure you turn out a good film.
Eli Roth is not that filmmaker, this is not that idea, and “Borderlands” is not a good film.
“Borderlands”, the newest sci-fi action film from Lionsgate, is based on a series of video games I’ve never played and only vaguely heard of. The film features an ensemble cast that includes Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Ariana Greenblatt, and the voice of Jack Black. How the filmmakers managed to get such big names for such a terrible film is beyond me. I can only assume Roth has some crazy dirt that he’s using to blackmail them.
Blanchett plays a bounty hunter named Lilith, a prototypical gun-slinging badass who’s only in it for the money. When rich corporate baddie Atlas (played by Edgar Ramírez) tasks her with rescuing his daughter, Tiny Tina, Lilith finds herself traveling back to her home planet of Pandora, a cross between “Mad Max” and Tatooine. She is soon joined by Claptrap, a sardonic, neurotic robot (voiced hilariously by Jack Black) who has been programmed by some unknown person to find and help her. But Tiny Tina (played by Ariana Greenblatt) isn’t so eager to go back to daddy. She’s been hiding with out on Pandora with the protection of a kind-hearted soldier named Roland (Kevin Hart) and a muscular, mute “Psycho” (played by German actor/boxer Florian Munteanu). The retrieval mission goes sideways and our characters are soon on the run as they realize Atlas has an evil, ulterior reason for wanting his daughter back. By the time Jamie Lee Curtis has joined the team, it’s become clear that the universe is at stake, and our band of antihero misfits are the only ones who can save it.
It’s worth noting that none of the characters have last names, speaking to the level of care and writing that went into the script.
To their credit, the actors put in work to make this weak, rambling script work. Hart does his best to channel his inner Chris Tucker as he aims for comedic action hero, and mostly succeeds. Blanchette brings a swaggering, bad bitch energy to the role, and there’re some fun moments early on when she’s interacting with Greenblatt, whose bratty, irreverent portrayal of Tiny Tina brings to life a character who is otherwise not very interesting. It’s a credit to these performers that they were able to turn a whole lot of nothing into something.
For all its faults, the film’s tone does make the first half bearable and, at times, mildly interesting. The film doesn’t take itself too seriously, which is good since there’s little to take serious in the first place. There’s some irreverent humor as our gang of misfits learn to set aside their differences and work together. Jack Black steals some scenes with his voicing of Claptrap (I suspect a good bit was improvised as some of his lines are much sharper than the rest of the bland dialogue in the film). It would be a stretch to call this film a “comedy”, but it deserves credit for at least knowing its place.
It would have been nice if the film had taken its actual story more seriously, though. The plot is held together by coincidences and unexplained happenstance, as if someone had planned to come back and write in a more coherent plot point but then never bothered. Most of the characters are written flatter than the open dessert they’re driving through, and even when we do learn some of their backstory, it’s often either glossed over or forgettable. Near the end, there’s a twist where we learn something important about Lilith, but the “twist” felt unearned and out of nowhere.
For the story itself, there’s a lot here, and yet none of it matters. The characters spend time searching for macguffins that will allow them to unlock some other macguffin, none of which I cared about. The world-building is thin, and the film’s mythology is inconsistent and just plain boring. Characters discover powers seemingly out of nowhere only for them to be forgotten about later. By the end, as our heroes face off against the evil Crimson I-Didn’t-Care-Enough-To-Remember-Their-Names, I couldn’t muster the interest to worry whether they’d succeed or fail. Even Edgar Ramírez seems bored on screen by how lazy and rushed the final act is. You can almost hear the filmmakers saying, “I dunno, I guess just… have the bad guy die or something?” It’s as if they wanted to just get this movie over with as quickly as possible – which is funny, since I felt the same way.
Perhaps the worst thing is the feeling of cheap, cartoonishness that permeates the film. The guns are comically large and the costuming – Blanchett’s red hair, Hart wearing a heavy jacket in a desert, Greenblatt sporting unexplained large bunny ears – looks like it’s straight out of an anime. All of this is clear fan service of course, since these are what the characters look like in the game, but what looks cool for an animated character looks out of place when transposed to live actors. The special effects, too, look like they’re out of a mid-2010’s video game. I kept expecting a prompt to flash on the screen saying “Press X to jump!”.
Years from now, when people write about video games and their film adaptations, I doubt they’ll talk about “Borderlands”. Not necessarily because it’s bad – though it is bad – but because it’s forgettable. It’s not good enough to be remembered, but it’s not also not goombas dancing in an elevator level of iconic bad. In a few years, the memory of this film will disappear, like sand on Pandora blowing away. And for the poor cast who got suckered into this abysmal production, that’s probably for the best.