For a minute there, I truly believed that the video game adaptation had finally broken through and come of age thanks to the likes of Sonic The Hedgehog, Super Mario Brothers, Twisted Metal, The Last Of Us, Fallout and Halo (well… maybe not Halo…), but it seems that the genre isn’t the stable producer of reliably quality content just yet.
You see, crashing the party with all the delicacy of a frat boy who turns up to an intervention drunk off his ass is Borderlands; Eli Roth’s latest genre shift after the bloody, seasonal fun of Thanksgiving – and I have to be honest with you, I’ve been wary of this one ever since I saw the first trailer that obviously was trying to pump out the same vibes as James Gunn’s Guardians Of The Galaxy to a near-desperate degree.
While I’ll admit, I’ve never played a Borderlands game in my life and thus might be missing a few things about the general lore, I know boring and I know bad and friends; this movie is both.
In a chaotic, violent universe run by monolithic corporations, we find the planet Pandora (no, not that one – another one), a ruthless wasteland that attracts all kinds of greedy scum due to the legends of a hidden, alien vault that is rumoured to contain untold alien treasures. Into this thrift store version of Furiosa is hurled Lilith, a sultry bounty hunter who is hired by the villainous head of the Atlas corporation to locate his kidnapped (read: liberated) daughter, Tiny Tina, who has been spirited away to Pandora by turncoat soldier, Roland. It seems that Tina is apparently the missing link in figuring out the whereabouts of that nebulous vault and is also integral to opening the thing too and Roland is trying to find redemption by stopping Altas from getting his corporate mitts on it.
Lilith, a former child of Pandora herself, is understandably reluctant to return to this sandy shithole, and her patience is tested even further when a trash talking, robot named Claptrap suddenly insists on joining her on her quest – but this is only the tip of the irritating iceberg. After catching up with Roland, Tina and her mountainous protector – the masked, axe weilding Kreig – Lilith soon finds that her mission has changed from a retrieval mission to a search as she gets reluctantly caught up in the search for the Vault.
But with Atlas’ troops, roving bands of barbarian hordes and giant piss monsters all trying to kill them in all sorts of various ways, the quest certainly won’t be easy no matter how many exploding teddy bears Tina manages to hurl at people. Can this mismatched group band together and manage to thwart a near endless stream of bloodthirsty lunatics and overthrow a galaxy spanning corporation?
So, seeing as life is short and I’ve just wasted around 100 minutes of it watching Borderlands, I guess I’d better not mince my words and get straight to the point – this may be the worst film I’ve seen at the cinema this year. Now before you tap me on the shoulder and helpfully remind me that the likes of Madame Web exists, I’d like to fire two points back at you. 1) Madame Web is obviously the result of mismanagement of a studio who kept chipping and changing the script to try and connect it to a shared universe that still hasn’t come together yet; and 2) at least that film is accidently funny thanks to how bad it is. In comparison, Borderlands doesn’t even have either of those two excuses to fall back on as it proves to be a monumental slog from beginning to end.
As I mentioned earlier, Roth and co. are obviously shooting for the same quite of warmhearted anarchy that made Guardians Of The Galaxy so wonderful to experience, but with all the wise cracks, needle drops and violently eccentric characters, it’s trying so hard to hit those heights, you can virtually smell the desperation leaking through the sceen like cheap cologne. On paper, it’s all seemingly there, but an utter lack of chemistry means that despite some painful attempts at heart that fall flatter than a crushed snail, these guys are just annoying.
Walking away with the most dignity is Cate Blanchett who gives Lilith the right amount of swagger to be an action hero, but she’s so one note, that not even an actress as talented as she can do much more than just look cool in a bright red wig. Elsewhere, Jack Black sort of comes of next best as the voice of kickable sass-bot Claptrap, but between the occasional solid one liners, he mostly plays merry hell on your nerves, as does Ariana Greenblatt’s Tiny Tina whose sole character trait (other than loving explosives) is that she has a plot given belief that she has main character syndrome. Elsewhere, the remaining leads kind of go through the motions – Kevin Hart makes absolutely no impact whatsoever as the soldier of the group and doesn’t get a single amusing line; Creed II’s Florian Munteanu is mostly unintelligible as the group’s hulking muscle and Jamie Lee Curtis spend the whole film rambling last minute expostition in a high pitched voice and you truly wonder why any of them bothered.
Aside from the jokes faceplanting left and right and the characters remaining firmly uningaging, the action is also surprisingly insipid and the world building is oddly flat for a videogame adaptation and I’m genuinely surprised that Eli Roth managed to do such an all round, bad job considering that Thanksgiving was something a return to form. There’s something to be said for the movie offering a bunch of action roles to a group of middle-aged women (Gina Gershon joins Blanchette and Curtis), but it would have been far more effective if the film had actually been worthy of their talents.
Also hampering matters is the fact that this is the third, dessert-set, Mad Max style wasteland in as many months and compared to Furiosa and even Deadpool & Wolverine’s wreckage strewn Void, Pandora just looks flat and uninspired. Sure there’s a few cool nods to the game such as breakable crates containing valuable collectables and the costumes will sure make fans of the game and cosplayers happy, but any and all good points are eventually crushed underfoot by an overwhelmingly bad finale that feels painfully small despite containing a cast member powering up to becoming a demigod-like being with wings made of fire.
With most of video game streaming series already guaranteed new seasons (well… maybe not Halo), the future of the video game adaption is still in far safer hands than Roth’s, but I would advise the usually fun director to return to his horror roots where his wit tends to shine a whole lot brighter than in a PG-13 summer blockbuster. There’s no chance at a respawn point for a movie that’s so blandly noisy, I found myself fixating more on the temperature of the cinema’s AC than what was going on on the screen.
Boredomlands.
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