Borderlands review: Eli Roth's star-studded video game adaptation is a complete mess

Call me an optimist, but I went to see writer-director Eli Roth’s film. Borderlands Hoping to have a good time, thus ignoring all of its red flags. I’ve seen several passable films that had to have a lot of retakes in post-production or sat on the shelf for an extended period, and not every film that doesn’t get a wide screening for critics should be dismissed out of hand. There’s a talented cast assembled on screen, and while I can’t say I’m a fan of the video game or familiar with it, I did enjoy the overall vibe of the trailers.

Borderlands

(Image credit: Lionsgate)

Release date: August 9, 2024
Directed by: Eli Roth
Written by: Eli Roth and Joe Crombie
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Edgar Ramírez, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu, Gina Gershon and Jamie Lee Curtis
Classification: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, language and some suggestive material.
Duration: 102 minutes

It turns out that one can be said to be not only optimistic, but also foolishly naive. All those warning signs were flying wildly for a reason: Borderlands This is a really bad movie. It’s weird to be hit over the head with constant exposition without getting a full sense of the world being created, and the only thing that ends up being more underdeveloped 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. Their sensibility is childish, their aesthetics are plastic, and there’s not a single stretch during its 102-minute running time where it achieves anything creative or absorbing.

Cate Blanchett (the only person in the cast who can even modestly sell the material) plays Lilith, a bounty hunter who’s hired by a slacker corporate executive named Atlas (Edgar Ramirez) to travel to a planet known as Pandora and rescue his daughter, Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), after she’s kidnapped by a soldier named Roland (Kevin Hart). When Lilith finds her targets, Atlas’s forces show up, but the cast members decide to band together for no apparent reason to fight them off, and set out to hunt down a mythical vault said to contain extremely advanced alien technology.

Also picked up along the way is a scarred, masked heel named Krieg (Florian Munteanu), a personality-less scientist named Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), and a dim-witted robot named Claptrap (Jack Black)… who, at most, make a single contribution to the story and then become background noise/a name to appear on the poster.

Borderlands desperately wants to be Guardians of the Galaxy, but it has none of the qualities that make James Gunn’s film so great.

With its band of not-so-heroic heroes and an energy that points directly to the nebulous concept of “avant-garde,” Borderlands Cries of effort to be the Guardians of the Galaxy of video game movies, and it’s pretty amazing to see how far it ends up coming from reality. Temporarily putting aside the utter lack of wit or jokes, the film seemingly forgets to provide even a single character with a compelling and/or special motivation; each one just shows up and becomes part of the group that moves from one plot point to the next. It’s also a wild waste of acting talent, as the stars are given nothing remotely exciting to work with and don’t even give their individual roles any personal flavor (it’s very strange to see Kevin Hart play a generic soldier who doesn’t get a chance to elicit even a single laugh).

If a potential blockbuster isn’t going to try to make you care about the characters’ goals, you’d expect it to at least be fun to spend a couple of hours with the personalities, but that’s just another area where Borderlands There’s an overwhelming, cliché-ridden crudeness that’s reminiscent of bad action movies from the 2000s and reminiscent of bad action movies from the 1980s, and even simple, gross-out jokes like the protagonists covered in urine and garbage seem overdone and forced.

Above all, what bothers me most is that Jack Black’s portrayal inspires extreme feelings of annoyance. As someone who has been a fan of Black’s throughout his career, it pains me to say it, but Claptrap reaches unbearable levels of hatred, which is certainly the point of the character, but it’s just too effective.

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

Not being someone who knows the Borderlands As for the video game, I can’t speak specifically to how faithful it is to the source material, but I can say that I get the feeling that it tries to cram in as many references and callbacks as it can, to the detriment of the film as a whole. Between the lazy voiceover narration, exposition-laden dialogue, and mini-plots, the film 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 or is referred to as a “psycho,” and when the plot finally starts to move forward 40 minutes into the film, it’s revealed that the characters are already in possession of two of the three keys they need to enter the aforementioned mythical vault. It’s a mess.

At a time when video game adaptations are finally starting to get going, TV shows are… The last of us and Radioactive dust The main examples of recent years are – Borderlands It seems like a huge step in the wrong direction. You don’t immediately see on screen what went wrong in the development of the film, but you shouldn’t make the same mistake I did and ignore all the warning signs.

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Borderlands review: Eli Roth’s star-studded video game adaptation is a complete mess

ByS. Jacob

By S. Jacob

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