Borderlands Review: Eli Roth's Star-Studded Video Game Adaptation Is A Total Mess

Call me an optimist, but I went into writer/director Eli Roth’s Borderlands hoping for a good time – and thusly ignoring its full assortment of red flags. I’ve seen a number of passable movies that underwent significant reshoots in post-production and/or sat on the shelf for an extended period, and not every film that doesn’t screen widely for critics should be instantly dismissed. There’s a talented ensemble put together on the screen, and while I can’t say that I am a fan of/familiar with the video game, I enjoyed the general vibe of the trailers.

As it turns out, you can not only call be an optimist, but also foolishly naïve. All of those red flags were wildly waving for a reason: Borderlands is a really bad movie. It’s a weird thing to be bashed over the head with constant exposition while failing to get a comprehensive idea of the world that is being established, and the only thing that ends up being more undeveloped than the story is the ensemble of characters – none of whom can even be called two-dimensional because that would be giving them too much credit. Its sensibilities are juvenile, its aesthetics are plastic, and there isn’t a solitary stretch during its 102 minute runtime when it accomplishes something creative or absorbing.

Cate Blanchett (the only person in the cast who can even modestly sell the material) stars as Lilith – a bounty hunter who is hired by a vague corporate executive named Atlas (Edgar Ramirez) to travel to a notorious planet called Pandora and rescue his daughter, Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), after she gets kidnapped by a soldier named Roland (Kevin Hart). When Lilith finds her targets, Atlas’ forces roll in, but the protagonists all decide to team up together for no discernable reason to fight back against them and go hunting for a mythic vault that is said to contain extremely advanced alien technology.

Also picked up along the way is a scarred, mask-wearing heavy named Krieg (Florian Munteanu), a personalityless scientist named Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), and a silly robot named Claptrap (Jack Black)… who, at most, each make a single contribution to the story and then just become background noise/a name to feature on the poster.

Borderlands desperately wants to be Guardians Of The Galaxy but has none of the qualities that makes James Gunn’s movie so great.

With its band of not-so-heroic heroes and an energy that that takes direct aim at the nebulous concept of “edgy,” Borderlands screams of effort to be the Guardians of the Galaxy of video game movies, and it’s rather stunning to witness just how far off the mark it ends up. Temporarily putting aside the utter lack of wit or banter, the film seemingly forgets to provide even a single character with a compelling and/or special motivation; each one just sort of appears and becomes a part of the group moving from plot point to plot point. It’s also a wild waste of performing talent, as the stars are given nothing even remotely exciting to work with and don’t even provide their individual roles with personal flavor (it’s a very strange thing to see Kevin Hart play a generic soldier who doesn’t get the chance to elicit even a single laugh).

If a would-be blockbuster isn’t going to try and get you to care about the character’s goals, you’d hope that it would at least be fun to spend a couple hours with the personalities – but that’s just another arena in which Borderlands fails. There is overwhelming clichéd badassness that is reminiscent of bad action movies from the 2000s badly echoing bad action movies from the 1980s, and even simple gross-out gags like the protagonists being covered in piss and garbage feel played out and forced.

Above all else, what I’m most resentful of is that it inspires extreme feelings of annoyance via Jack Black’s performance. As someone who has been a fan of Black’s for his entire career, that hurts to say, but Claptrap reaches unbearable levels of obnoxious – which is admittedly the point of the character, but it’s far too effective.

One wishes that even a quarter of the energy spent on world-building in Borderlands was redirected into telling a competent story.

Not being someone who knows the Borderlands video game, I can’t specifically speak to how faithful it is to the source material – but I can say that I get the sense it tries to jam in as many references and callbacks as it can muster, much to the overall film’s detriment. Between lazy voice over narration, exposition-heavy dialogue, and mini plotlines, the movie desperately tries to suggest that audiences are being introduced to an expansive galaxy, but most of the material is either confusing to newcomers or hollow in the context of the story being told. Meanwhile, I have no idea why Krieg wears a mask/is referred to as a “psycho,” and when the plot finally gets moving 40 minutes into the runtime, it’s revealed that the characters are already in possession of two of the three keys they need to get into the aforementioned mythic vault. It’s a mess.

At a time when video game adaptations are finally starting to really click and work – the TV shows The Last Of Us and Fallout being prime examples from the last couple of years – Borderlands feels like a massive step in the wrong direction. It’s not instantly apparent on screen exactly what went wrong in the development of the movie, but you shouldn’t make the same mistake I did and ignore all of the red flags.