Borderline Unwatchable
Fire up Amazon and watch ‘Fallout’ instead.
Borderlands
Director: Eli Roth • Writers: Eli Roth, Joe Crombie, based on the game by Gearbox
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jack Black, Ariana Greenblatt, Edgar Ramírez, Florian Munteanu, Gina Gershon
USA • 1hr 42mins
Opens Hong Kong Aug 8 • IIA
Grade: D
Let’s just say it: Borderlands is a strong contender for Worst Film of the Year; it’s a lock for the Top 10. It’s hard to imagine much coming down the pipe later that could be as simultaneously joyless, low-energy, dull, exhausting and shite as Borderlands. Miscast top to bottom – how often have you uttered the words “Cate Blanchett is terrible” – unfunny, obnoxious and tired, director Eli Roth is clearly outside his comfort zone with this. Maybe he’s a fan of the game but the laziness evident on screen here makes you wonder if he ever played it. Will gamers be interested? Maybe if they’re stoned, but even the built-in audience is going to feel let down by sloppy writing (I supported the writers’ strike for this?), derivative storytelling and second hand production design. Rumour has it Roth – let’s face it, a horror guy in his soul – has been sweating and fretting over his adaptation of the Borderlands game for years, and if that’s true, it’s clear he was aiming for something like his own personal Mad Max: Fury Road, or at the very least a fun, goofy bit of B schlock like the delicious junk food perfected by the Italians in the 1980s: think the boundless lunatic energy of The Barbarians or Krull, or the less Italian bonkers glory of Megaforce. Look, if it had “Cannon Films” at the start you were good to go. None of that shitty but sincere glee is here. This movie is terrible.
Not Fallout
It doesn’t help that the mammoth cut scene that is Borderlands comes in the shadow of Amazon’s surprisingly sharp Fallout or James Gunn’s superior spin on The Suicide Squad, both of which this resembles, at least on the surface. Scratch that surface and you find discount Zack Snyder. We start with narration by Blanchett’s bounty hunter Lilith, droning on about the crappy world of Pandora, the location of a vault left behind by Eridians or some shit. Legend states the vault can be opened by a “Daughter of Eridia” and of course every megacorporation in the known universe wants it, especially Atlas Corp., run by a dude called, er, Atlas (Edgar Ramírez). His daughter Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt, Barbie, and here eminently punchable), it turns out, is Eridian (don’t ask) – but she’s been kidnapped by one of his own special forces soldiers, Roland (a neutered Kevin Hart, amazingly not the most irritatingly shrill part of this movie). Atlas hires Lilith to get her back, and as soon as she lands on Pandora she picks up a droid called Claptrap (voiced by Jack Black – this is the most irritatingly shrill part of the movie) and if you’ve ever seen a movie about the fucking Chosen One you know the droid is important somehow; he has a “Help Me Obi-Wan Kenobi” hologram if you missed it. The team of misfits includes unspeaking giant Krieg (Florian Munteanu) and later the possibly autistic … archaeologist I want to say, Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis) and when compiled it’s off we go to find the vault and protect Tiny Tina. There is nothing witty, creative or charming in any of this extremely lumbering 100-odd minutes.
It’s truly an amazing feat when there is so much to say about a movie and yet so little. Roth and co-writer Joe Crombie (which may be a pseudonym for Chernobyl writer Craig Mazin) – allegedly one of seven – take the easy road at every turn, never aiming for anything beyond what we’ve seen a million times before. The humour is juvenile: I think we’re supposed to find Lilith’s dry, jaded tough gal act amusing (it’s not) and Tina’s irreverent, self-aware psychosis cheeky (it’s not). The alleged gags peak with a diarrhoea “joke” from Claptrap that makes me despair for humanity. Every time Claptrap claims he’s been shot to death or yells for help falling down a cavern you hope beyond hope that’s truly it for him, but no. He lives! And here I thought I wanted C3PO to get stuck in a trash compactor more than anything in this world. I was wrong. The VFX are standard at best, the bloodless visuals are overly familiar and the actors are wasted. Hacky as he is, at least Snyder has an unmistakable aesthetic that he’s dedicated to. This doesn’t even have that. Borderlands is to game movies as Kim Kardashian is to feminism. After 2021’s Mortal Kombat, The Last of Us and Fallout worked so hard to make video game adaptations respectable, Borderlands is setting the whole movement back years. And I swear to god, one more Star Wars (from 1977) riff and I’m going to start throwing punches. — DEK