Director: Eli Roth
Writers: Eli Roth, Joe Abercrombie
Stars: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Edgar Ramirez
Synopsis: Based on the best-selling videogame, this all-star action-adventure follows a ragtag team of misfits on a mission to save a missing girl who holds the key to unimaginable power.
Pick a volume, any volume: Borderlands is a generic rip-off of Guardians of the Galaxy. This is a consensus we can all agree on. However, it’s not just the source material; the action role-playing first-person shooter space Western video game by Gearbox Software shows that writer and director Eli Roth didn’t merely pay homage to the Marvel franchise but stole from it blatantly.
The game is so heavily drenched in CGI, exposition, and generally poor dialogue that it feels like Eli Roth’s Borderlands is attempting to create an interactive video game for the cinema, relying heavily on repetitive scenes and narrowly linear storytelling.
This brings us to the most interesting question – what is Cate Blanchett doing in a movie like this? I almost hope this film was done pre-Tár as research, where a renowned figure’s downfall leads them to conduct a video game soundtrack or, in this case, starring in one of the worst video game adaptations in recent memory.
The story follows Lillith (Blanchett), a bounty hunter who is as cutthroat as they come – in this first scene, she blows away a victim without mercy. Lillith then receives a phone call from one of her reliable clients, a galactic corporate tycoon named Atlas (Edgar Ramírez). He wants Lillith to return to her home planet of Pandora to rescue his daughter, Tina (Ariana Greenblatt),
Tina was abducted by Roland (Kevin Hart, doing his usual Kevin Hart things), a former soldier turned mercenary. With the help of his former institutionalized friend, Krieg (Creed’s Florian Munteanu), Roland takes Tina, but not for the reasons you might think. When Lilith arrives, she is met by Claptrap (voiced by Jack Black), a robot programmed with an agenda by Atlas.
From there, the script by Roth and Joe Abercrombie—surprising, given that the latter is the writer behind one of the most original series to come out in the past decade, Love, Death + Robots—devolves into a generic chase picture, albeit with some bells and whistles that quickly become tedious.
These include a private army created by Atlas, known as the Eridians, engineered from the genetic material of an alien race that once inhabited Pandora. This is a modern spin on colonization from their script. The idea here is that Atlas believes Tina can unlock the ancient civilization’s advanced technology.
Well, as if creating a killer demented army from genetic material wasn’t advanced enough in the first place.
I found it strange that Lionsgate has done everything in its power to avoid not only marketing Borderlands, which they heavily promoted with the announcement last winter, but also keeping Eli Roth’s name off of it, even excluding it from the marquee. A beloved slasher-porn director seems to be trying to straighten out his heavily R-rated career with this tepid, candy-colored, PG-13 fare.
Why wouldn’t the studio allow Roth to bring his own hard edge to a popcorn picture that desperately needed it? You have to wonder if the stellar cast, which also includes Academy Award winner Jamie Lee Curtis and Haley Bennett, signed up for something original and out of their comfort zones. (Okay, probably for the money.)
The scenes have all the spark of a read-through, as if the cast is figuring out how to cash their checks and spend their money before the first take.
The film’s tone is a mess, seeming as if Roth doesn’t know how to helm a sci-fi picture without relying on graphic slasher-style encounters, instead opting to heavily “borrow” from the likes of George Miller and Luc Besson, but without Miller’s visceral quality or Besson’s cinematic action style.
Borderlands is simply a cheap imitation.
