Now playing in UK and US cinemas is the sci-fi action movie, Borderlands. The film – directed by Eli Roth – is based on the video game series of the same name and stars Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis, Édgar Ramirez, Ariana Greenblatt, and Jack Black.
In the movie, Lilith is a tough and successful bounty hunter who certainly knows how to handle herself. One day, she is approached by the President of the Atlas Corporation who wants to hire her to locate his daughter, Tina, who is missing somewhere on the planet, Pandora.
After accepting the job, Lilith travels to Pandora in search of the girl. Here she finds Tina, as well as a rag-tag group, and a plot involving a sacred vault.
Shot in June 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, but only now just arriving in cinemas in mid-2024, it doesn’t take a computer whiz to work out this isn’t a great movie. There’s been no huge rush to get this film to audiences, and very little advertising to promote it either, and unless you’re a huge fan of the game series it is based on, I doubt you’ll really care about it at all.
Heck, even if you are a fan of the games, I’m not sure you’ll be that fussed. Borderlands is uninspiring sci-fi tosh, which plays like a generic post-apocalyptic B-movie, and does nothing to delight or excite.
It’s not terrible, but it’s not special in any way and the script is lousy. Everything in the movie has been done countless times before, and in some cases on a smaller budget and with far more imagination.
Borderlands’ biggest misstep is the way it completely wastes its cast. Blanchett, Curtis, Hart, and Black are all capable of delivering so much more than this film allows, and for the most part they feel like props in a computer-generated world.
This group of actors should shine, but alas, they don’t at all. They also share zero chemistry on screen, which just feels odd.
Blanchett does at least look cool, so this is something, I guess. However, you’d really have to mess up to make Blanchett look bad, so this speaks more about the strength of the actress than it does about director Eli Roth.
Roth incidentally has a patchy CV, littered with films that work (Cabin Fever, Hostel), and films that don’t (Knock Knock, Thanksgiving), and Borderlands certainly falls into the latter category. It misses the mark from start to finish, and never quite sits right.
I can sort of see what he is going for – a sci-fi actioner with laughs – but he just doesn’t manage to pull it off. The action sequences are poor, the comedy is flat, and if you’re over the age of 12 there’s really nothing here for you.
Ultimately the age thing is perhaps the real sticking point with Borderlands. The games are made for the 18+ crowd, yet in the UK the movie is a 12A.
It’s as if the film has been stripped of anything even remotely adult or edgy and it shows. Whatever appeals to gamers is missing in this cinematic adventure, and the whole thing lacks bite.
Borderlands has opened a couple of weeks after the highly anticipated juggernaut that is Deadpool & Wolverine and in my humble opinion it is going to be a struggle for this film to gain any impact or traction in its wake. There’s nothing original here, and certainly nothing worth the cost of a cinema ticket, so I expect it to be completely engulfed in Deadpool’s shadow.
Audiences want something interesting, imaginative, or eventful, and Borderlands is none of this. It’s something that has been done before and you really don’t need to see it done again.
Video game adaptations have improved considerably in recent times, with The Last of Us, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and Fallout all delivering, but Borderlands falls short. Hopefully this is just a blip and the elevation of video game adaptations can continue, once this underwhelming offering has been and gone.
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