Borderlands Is a Total Catastrophe

I don’t play the video game Borderlands, and I’m also not much of a fan of Eli Roth’s movies, so I may not have been the target audience for Eli Roth’s movie adaptation of the video game Borderlands. Then again, my son is excited to see the film, which means I’ll have to watch it again — so I was at least invested in this film being good. Alas, it is not. It is so not. I’m not sure Roth’s to blame, however, as rumors have swirled around the production that he was replaced by Deadpool director (and Borderlands producer) Tim Miller, who apparently reshot much of it. Writer Craig Mazin had his name removed from the film as well. This movie is not exactly trailing clouds of glory, let’s just say. To give you an idea of how long it’s been sitting on Lionsgate’s shelf, Cate Blanchett made Borderlands before she made Tár, a movie that premiered at the Venice Film Festival two years ago.

Yes, the great Cate Blanchett stars in this picture, and I wish I could tell you that she’s a bright spot, that she brings fun and fiery conviction to the part of gruff interstellar bounty hunter Lilith as she makes her way through the corporate wasteland planet Pandora with a ragtag crew of bickering misfits. There’s clearly some meta-joke in casting such a respected actress as a Han Solo figure, and Blanchett certainly has the versatility to pull it off. She does at least seems to be in on this joke, lowering her voice to a coarse, cynical rasp — but the performance rarely rises above bad-sketch territory as she delivers wooden tough-guy lines like “I’m getting too old for this shit,” “God, I hate this planet,” and “We’re gonna need some wheels,” while swaggering around looking somehow both purposeful and bored.

Something similar could be said for Kevin Hart, who plays a rogue soldier named Roland who’s tasked himself with protecting Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), the pyromaniac daughter of the galaxy’s most powerful man, the ruthless Atlas (Edgar Ramírez). Hart can be a lively presence onscreen, and he’s presumably here to wisecrack his way through the spectacle, but nobody’s bothered to write him any funny lines. (Claptrap, a robot voiced by Jack Black, does get some decent laughs, it should be noted.)

Borderlands is trying to be a comedy, but it’s also trying to be a compelling space-adventure fantasy, too, with big battles and chases and whatnot. Tina, we’re told, holds special powers that will allow her to open the Eridian Vault, which houses the treasures and technology of the lost civilization that once inhabited Pandora. Atlas wants Tina because he wants what’s in the vault. There are also some “keys” required to open the Vault, though I was confused as to whether there were supposed to be one or two or three keys. Maybe it’s because I’m not a gamer. Or maybe narrative logic wasn’t at the top of anyone’s agenda with this film.

One of the strangest things about so many of these studio salvage-job disasters is that we’re often left wondering: What happened to the salvaging? This movie feels like it’s been shredded to bits, stripped clean of personality and character and coherence, presumably in an effort to get it short enough to sneak in some additional screening times. (The picture does clock in at a limber 100 minutes, so there’s that.) Scenes and plot points in Borderlands whizz by with little care or reason. The action is jumbled. Nothing holds together, and very little is paid off. One of our crew of heroes is Krieg (Florian Munteanu), who we’re told is some sort of escaped psychopath. You’d think that this would mean he’d do something psychopathic at some point in the movie (“It’s time to go insaaane!”), but alas, no such luck. At one point, our heroes face off against a whole army of escaped psychopaths (“These are the psychos other psychos are afraid of!”), but they, too, don’t really do anything particularly psychotic. They just shout a lot and be large.

This is what I mean when I say that Eli Roth is probably not to blame. Surely the man who made Hostel and Knock-Knock and Cabin Fever could have been counted on to deliver some scenes featuring masked space psychos run amok on a lawless planet. (That’s how bad Borderlands is: These are movies I don’t even like, and here I am, recalling them vaguely fondly.) Similarly, the choppy action scenes and the wan, lifeless incorporation of the film’s settings and backgrounds with the characters’ movements smack of postproduction shenanigans more than they do of on-set incompetence, though it’s fair to assume there was enough of the latter to go around as well. I sincerely doubt there’s a good director’s cut of this film out there somewhere — it’s all just so, so unspeakably, abysmally bad — but also, whoever thought they were saving this thing appears to have made it far, far worse.

Anyway, can’t wait to see it again.

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