BORDERLANDS - Mark Reviews Movies

Borderlands, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 9, 2024

The video games are bright, colorful, and brimming with wicked personality, but the movie adaptation Borderlands is dull, possesses long stretches of gray, and feels cobbled together from the formula of any given science-fiction actioner. In terms of a potential audience's awareness of the source material, this is the worst of both worlds. Those who know the games won't recognize them in this movie. Meanwhile, anyone who has no idea of them will probably wonder how something that inspired such a lifeless adaptation could become popular enough for this movie to exist in the first place.

Even ignoring the failure of adaptation, this is pretty dreary stuff. The plot involves a pair of rescue missions, both with the goal of saving an explosion-happy child from a real or perceived villain, before becoming a treasure hunt for a mysterious, long-buried technological fortune in a hidden vault on a wild planet. That basic summary makes the story sound more fun than it actually is, and considering that the movie is co-written and directed by Eli Roth, the absence of any really diabolical humor here is even more confounding.

Instead, we meet a ragtag group of heroes whose interests collide and eventually merge on the remote planet of Pandora. It was once home to an advanced race of aliens who ruled the galaxy and whose technology served as the basis for all of humanity's scientific leaps forward. Oh, there's space travel in this story, as well as all kinds of weapons, but for the most part, everything on Pandora and beyond just looks like junk, while the futuristic characters speak in slang from about five years ago.

Lilith (Cate Blanchett), a galactic bounty hunter, explains the back story in some opening narration, explaining the stuff with the aliens, their disappearance, and how corporations and private vault-hunters from across the galaxy have searched for the treasure, usually dying in the process. She's hired by Atlas (Edgar Ramírez), one of those business magnates, to find his daughter, who was abducted by Roland (Kevin Hart), a rogue member of Atlas' corporate militia. Roland actually saves the daughter, named Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), from imprisonment, since Atlas has some plan for the girl in mind.

Eventually, Lilith, Roland, Tina, the girl's masked and muscular bodyguard Krieg (Florian Munteanu), and an irritating robot named Claptrap (voice of Jack Black) team up to evade Atlas and figure out how to stop him from gaining access to the vault. All of this should probably be an excuse to explore this vast wasteland of a planet, filled with caverns and makeshift fortresses and dangerous beasts and marauding gangs of self-proclaimed "Psychos," and to allow these seemingly distinct characters to interact with each other. That would mean a movie that stays true to the spirit of its source material, though, and Roth and Joe Crombie's screenplay apparently has little interest in something like that.

No, the characters are bland, with Blanchett's fiery red hair giving her character more personality than anything in the script and Hart continuing an unfortunate trend of taking himself too seriously in an obviously comedic role. Jamie Lee Curtis appears later as vault expert Tannis, who knew Lilith's mother and her tragic history, but the most she can provide the exposition-spouting character is the tinge of a silly voice. Black's robot is annoying because the screenwriters try to make it funny, instead of letting the character be funny because it's annoying—a subtle but crucial distinction.

Greenblatt's Tina serves as the stand-out, if only because the character, who stuffs stuffed animals with high explosives, is the only hint of a genuinely eccentric and devious personality among the bunch. Mostly, the character is a plot device, a "special one" with the ability to open the vault, and the plot itself amounts to tracking down another MacGuffin or two, namely physical keys to locate and unlock the vault.

Anyway, the team goes looking for the keys, encounters a single monster and some of those roving gangs, and shoots them in action sequences that keep getting darker (One darkened hallway filled with crates leads a pitch black one with a strobe light) and/or more incoherent. The characters make some quips, sometimes garbled by the loud gunshots, and make their way toward the goal. Repeat until a climax with cheap visual effects and any trace of personality has been drained from the material.

That's the movie Borderlands. Don't blame the games, except that their makers let them be turned into something so woefully generic.

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