I have spent hundreds of hours in the worlds of Gearbox Software and 2K Games’ “Borderlands,” enraptured by its addictive structure, one that encourages exploration, teamwork, and a constant pursuit of new weapons to unleash on waves of enemies (I’ve written about it here and here, among many other places). While these games are undeniably repetitive – like any titles based on what they call loot farming, which means looking for better and better gear that you can call your own – they also exist in a massive world of truly memorable characters like Claptrap, Mad Moxxi, Tiny Tina, and Handsome Jack. The most common setting, the planet of Pandora, is populated by everything from dragon-like creatures to masked enemies who look a lot like the suicidal maniacs in “Mad Max: Fury Road.” And all of this comes with creative design choices and clever plotting that often includes jokes and twists that harken back to an old-fashioned, almost Vaudevillian sense of humor. It’s not unlike Mel Brooks meets George Miller.
All of this is to say that my biggest concern after watching Eli Roth’s abysmal “Borderlands” is that it will now tarnish the legacy of a pop culture franchise that deserves better. Nothing that works about the games has been adapted intact in this ugly, boring, truly inept piece of filmmaking, a movie that was mostly shot years ago and should have been shelved even longer. Like, maybe forever.
Cate Blanchett (who made this before “TAR” and before Roth made “Thanksgiving,” to give you some idea how long it’s been gathering dust) stars as Lilith, one of the beloved Vault Hunters from the video game that has made the jump from console to screen. In this version, Lilith is a bounty hunter, approached one night by employees of the all-powerful Atlas (Edgar Ramirez), who has a high-paying job for the tough-talking mercenary. When Lilith is swayed by the amount of money that Atlas is willing to pay for the gig, I laughed, thinking (hoping) that Blanchett also got a life-changing amount of cash to star in a project that’s this far below her talent level.
The job is to find Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), the daughter of Atlas, who has been kidnapped by another classic video game character named Roland (Kevin Hart), a soldier who has gone rogue and escaped to Pandora with the girl and a “Psycho” named Krieg (Florian Munteanu). She may be the answer to a legendary vault on Pandora that has created an entire industry of treasure hunters trying to find it.
On returning to her home planet of Pandora, Lilith runs into a robot named Claptrap (voiced by Jack Black), who serves as a sort of comic relief. This, of course, would imply there’s actual comedy in this film. There is not. Just endless rambling. Fans of the game will notice some other familiar personalities like Moxxi (Gina Gershon) and Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis). According to some published credits, Scooter and Hammerlock also make appearances. But blink, and you’ll miss them. I must have blinked.
Lilith, Roland, Tannis, Claptrap, and Krieg should be an obvious variation on the Guardians of the Galaxy, outcasts on a distant planet who have to use their different strengths to save the day as a team. But the script by Roth and Joe Crombie is flatly uninterested in giving them memorable traits. Blanchett is such a great actress that she sells a little bit of this defiantly shallow screenplay with a smirk, but Hart looks visibly bored at times, perhaps swallowed up in the reshoots that led to a lot of the delays on the release of this film.
On that note, the script for “Borderlands” was once credited to Craig Mazin, the genius behind “Chernobyl” and “The Last of Us,” but he’s taken his name off the film now after the reshoots. When a film goes through that much turmoil, one can usually see where the final product has been Frankenstein-ed back together, but even that game is hard to play here. One can imagine a Mazin version that puts a bit more love and care into the world-building than this version, but so little of that has made it to the final cut.
Part of the reason it fails in that department is that Roth, a director I’ve defended in the horror genre a few times, is remarkably inept at directing action. When the film bursts into gunfire, to call these sequences incoherent would be polite. I’m not sure if cinematographer Rogier Stoffers and/or editors Julian Clarke & Evan Henke deserve some of the blame, but the fight scenes are baffling in their construction. They’re cut in a way that makes it impossible to know the geography of an action scene, or really to care about what happens in them. It may sound picky, but a movie based on an action video game needs at least to provide visceral, escapist entertainment in the guns-and-punches department. There’s not a single memorable action beat in this movie. Not one.
After decades of being considered poison for creative artists, video game movies have earned something of a commercial and critical reappraisal in the last few years. A critical darling like “The Last of Us” and a commercial one like “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” means that Hollywood has found a new vein of beloved IPs to tap and they’re going to make ALL of your favorite games into movies. As my mind wandered in the mid-section of “Borderlands” to other games I love, and how similar projects could ruin my affection for them, I had a vision of Eli Roth’s “Elden Ring.” I almost started to cry.
