THE STORY – Based on the best-selling videogame, this all-star action-adventure follows a ragtag team of misfits on a mission to save a missing girl who holds the key to unimaginable power.
THE CAST – Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Ariana Greenblatt, Jack Black, Jamie Lee Curtis, Florian Munteanu, Gina Gershon & Édgar Ramírez
THE TEAM – Eli Roth (Director/Writer) & Joe Crombie (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 102 Minutes
After the slight disruption of superhero films drifting away from modern moviegoers’ cultural consciousness, studios are already scrambling to find the next trend to profit from. Naturally, it made sense to pivot from one alternate form of media to another as the video game boom could finally commence. Sure, video game films have often been tried experiments by studios, but they mostly led to critical and financial disaster (think “Hitman” on both attempts). Who’s to say what’s different now in moviegoing audiences? Maybe we’ve lowered our standards on what we perceive as a quality film. Perhaps you just need to implement the correct number of references and easter eggs to satiate audiences. Even if it does lead to studios leaning towards cookie-cutter projects after the recent success of Sony adaptations like “Uncharted” and “The Last of Us,” Pandora’s box has officially been opened. Now, filmmaker Eli Roth is willing to take a chance on a beloved game franchise with “Borderlands,” and he’s hoping to take audiences on a memorable trip to the blood-soaked wasteland that is Pandora (no, unfortunately, not that one). What audiences do get, however, is one of the most disjointed and unassuming studio films in recent memory.
“Borderlands” starts with a quickly boorish exposition about the planet Pandora and the vault hunters so desperate to capture the treasure hidden on said planet. After introducing a few characters through an underwhelming opening action sequence, we are finally introduced to Lilith (played by Cate Blanchett), a seasoned bounty hunter just trying to get by with what few bounties she can cash in. One night, Lilith is approached by corporate tycoon Atlas (Édgar Ramírez), desperate to retrieve his daughter Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) from the hands of two kidnappers, Roland (Kevin Hart) and Krieg (Florian Munteanu). Lilith begrudgingly heads back to her home planet in search of Tina and, along the way, forms an unlikely bond with this group of misfits that leads them to the heart of Pandora.
Frankly, from top to bottom, “Borderlands” fails at every level of filmmaking. It’s impressive how Roth can elicit the poor quality of 2000s video game adaptation energy yet somehow forget the discernable sense of fun or style that made even those terrible movies stand out. Combined with his poor direction, the screenplay for “Borderlands” is a fragmented mess. Roth and co-writer Joe Crombie interpret the universe of the “Borderlands” games with such lifeless word building and characters so stale that audiences are checked out before it even gets going. The story itself feels like a multitude of ideas battling one another, and in return, it leads to so many incoherently pieced-together moments. What was changed from the original script that would have Craig Mazin (writer of “The Last of Us” and “Chernobyl”) asking to have his name removed from the project? Word around Hollywood about the quality of “Borderlands” screenplay was known by many; surely there had to be something there to attract the likes of an ensemble that was talented alone be led by the one and only Academy Award-winning sure to one day be hailed as one of the greatest of all time, Cate Blanchett.
Besides Blanchett and Greenblatt, who attempt to give some dimension to such one-note characters, nobody in the cast comes out unscathed. Roth’s rudimentary sense of directing actors could drain any sense of screen presence from Hollywood’s most likable stars, and that is entirely on display in “Borderlands.” Actors like Kevin Hart and Edgar Ramirez are phoning in their performances as they read out laughable dialogue. Jamie Lee Curtis and Jack Black are operating on new annoying levels that I’m not sure even their harshest critics knew was possible from either. Black’s interpretation of the quip-delivery machine Claptrap, which sounds like a perfect fit on paper, leads to such unamusing results that it’s frankly embarrassing.
Personally, my experience with the video games this movie is based on is minimal, as I’m more familiar with “Borderland’s” attempted aesthetic than the lore itself. So it’s baffling to see someone like Roth, whose “edgy” and often gore-filled filmmaking has shied away from the series’ signature stylized violence. His typically gratuitous and juvenile nature is one of the more appealing aspects that could have at least played into something we know he’s brought to the screen before. One can’t help but feel as if studio interference is to blame or if Roth truly couldn’t crack what makes “Borderlands” work in general. Whether it’s the banal visual effects, bland staging of the action sequencing, or the manner in which characters inhabit the frame, Roth struggles to get anything to its full potential or approach some form of excitement. It’s shocking to see how “Borderlands” turned out because his previous film “Thanksgiving” is night and day, better than whatever this is, as it plays into his best tendencies and proves he’s capable of crafting an entertaining genre film. Maybe he’s at his best whenever he chooses to work on smaller projects, specifically in the horror genre. It’s hard to recognize Roth’s best traits or anything remotely sound in “Borderlands,” a film that is never bordering on decent or even mediocre levels of quality but is stuck in a land of awfulness and embarrassment and should be considered an insult to the devoted fans of the game itself.
