An hour after leaving a screening of the new Borderlands movie, directed by Eli Roth (Hostel) and starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Ariana Greenblatt, I’m staring at a blinking cursor in a blank Google Doc, urging inspiration to strike.
Surely a live-action movie based on the wildly successful edgelord video game franchise from 2K and Gearbox would inspire a couple hundred words, right? Surely the star-studded cast, which includes several Oscar winners (and Jack Black), would prompt a spark of creativity. Surely the vibrant visuals, cacophonous explosions, and poop and pee jokes would destroy the writer’s block dam, sending forth a surge of witty words and succinct sentences. But I’m at a loss.
Borderlands is not just bad, it’s depressing.
On the border of a breakdown
I saw Borderlands at an early screening at Alamo Drafthouse, during which cosplay was encouraged. No one wore costumes, and the theater was solemnly silent, as if we were about to watch archival video of the deadliest WWII battle or found footage from 9/11. R-rated trailers aired before it, prompting me to question if this movie, directed by Roth (known for his gory, gross violence), was rated R (it’s not).
Before I have a chance to double-check the rating, Cate Blanchett’s voice echoes through the theater. “Long ago, our galaxy was ruled by an alien race,” she intones, sounding bizarrely flat for an incredibly talented actor who endeavored to deliver a fun, frenetic performance in another superficial flick: 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok. I’m immediately assaulted by aggressive, slap-dash cuts and shimmery CGI images of guns, neon signs, and Psychos, as Blanchett (who plays Lilith, a character who inspired early-twenties me so much I got one of her quotes tattooed) gives us the plot overview with as much energy as a ‘50s housewife who regularly mixes mood stabilizers and martinis.
Lilith tells us that the Eridians laid the foundation of this galaxy, then disappeared, leaving behind a secret vault hidden on the planet Pandora, inside of which are powerful relics of the long-lost civilization. “That sounds like some wacko B.S., huh?” Blanchett asks. I stifle a groan with a huge bite of my burger. Rather than giving moviegoers the free-wheeling wanderlust that the Borderlands games offer, the film is incredibly linear and straightforward: Lilith, a bounty hunter, is hired by the head of arms manufacturer Atlas Industries to track down his daughter Tiny Tina on the planet Pandora.
We’re introduced to almost all of the main cast rather quickly: Hart as Roland, Greenblatt as Tiny Tina, Florian Munteanu as a Psycho named Kreig. Roland breaks Tiny Tina out of some kind of facility by way of a fairly bland action sequence, during which he punches a guard and calls him a “fake Stormtrooper-ass bitch.” I guess that means Star Wars exists in the Borderlands universe? It doesn’t improve after this.
If you told me Borderlands used AI for its dialogue, I’d believe you without question. Nearly every line that’s uttered with the kind of fake peppiness I’d reserve for my elementary school cheer competitions is either a limp-dicked “edgy” joke that wouldn’t warrant a single Reddit upvote or a cliche phrase like “I’m too old for this shit” and “This has been a really long day.” I could count on one hand the lines that were thoroughly genuine—or at least not dripping with so much snark they were almost sticky. There is no humanity here, just humorless humans.
When a needle-drop of Muse’s “Supermassive Black Hole” bleeds into a scene in which it’s playing over the speakers in a Pandoran bar, I nearly slam my head onto the table. What are we doing here?
We need to talk about Tina
Blissfully, Borderlands isn’t that long of a movie, and the breakneck speed at which the film is paced means we meet Jamie Lee Curtis’ Tannis just before I need a pee break (I chugged a beer). Curtis plays her with a socially awkward twitchiness that I didn’t expect from the actor, and while it’s at least an attempt at imbuing the character with a personality, it is incredibly grating. But again, she tried—Blanchett is phoning it in, Hart has no business playing the straight man, and Greenblatt is doing the best she can with material that’s based on a white character doing a blaccent (which the film, thankfully, avoids). But even she can’t save a line read that requires her to say “badonkadonk” in the year of our lord 2024.
And also, not to be ageist, but why the fuck is everyone so old? Lilith is 22 years old in the original Borderlands game and Tannis is in her thirties—aside from the star power afforded by casting Blanchett and Curtis, the only reason for aging up these characters is so they can play matronly figures to Greenblatt’s Tina.
And therein lies the main problem: centering Tina. The plot revolves around her believing she is the child of Eridia and the key to opening the vault, and the film hinges all of the emotional weight on a character who wears a bunny-ear headband and throws explosive teddy bears at people while spewing one-liners like a sugar-crazed 11-year-old in a Fortnite lobby. She does not inspire any sort of empathy, even with Greenblatt’s valiant efforts and Blanchett’s only real acting taking place in their scenes together. It’s like making a Gears of War movie with a Carmine brother at the center—it’s going to be annoying from the jump.
All of this takes place in a weird CGI world that occasionally looks decent but is more often an illegible green-screen mess of explosions or muddy, dark, murky nonsense. Lilith’s flame-orange hair and comic book costume set against a dusty, bland landscape and broken-down industrial buildings is visually and tonally jarring—it’s like the filmmakers got halfway to making a movie inspired by the cel-shaded world of Borderlands and then dumped it all onto the sets used for the Halo series. Speaking of costumes, I’d love to know what the budget was for push-up bras. Tannis, Mad Moxxi, and Lilith all have their breasts pushed up so high they’re nearly in their throats—it is so desperately 2006, so reminiscent of the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, that I couldn’t help but giggle. Boobs, am I right?
By the time the film ends and Jack Black’s Claptrap pops up on screen during the credits to lament the loss of his Easter egg, I am ready to go home and cleanse my palate. I need some proper aughts trashiness, some expensive needle drops, and some questionable costumes. I get home, plop down on the couch, and turn on Gossip Girl. At least this has personality.
The Borderlands movie isn’t so good it’s surprising, and it’s not so bad it’s worth a hate-watch. It is simply sad. It feels like the result of a bunch of suits who sat around a glossy mahogany table (like in that one Key and Peele sketch) and reminisced about the early aughts, a time before the financial crisis, a time when the term “cancel” was reserved only for television shows, a time when Muse was one of the biggest rock bands on the planet.
It is devoid of humanity and personality, despite trying very, very hard to establish that it is quirky. It is the woman with frozen peas on her head in the grocery store aisle—she’s so crazzzzzyy, love her! It should not exist.
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