Posted by BORDERLANDS; 2024; Written by Joe Crombie and Eli Roth, based on the video game series by Gearbox; Directed by Eli Roth; Starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis; Rated PG-13; Lionsgate; 1h42m; theatrical release Aug 9, 2024.
Picture this. It’s 2014. An executive at Lionsgate plays Fallout 3, watches Guardians of the Galaxy, and snorts enough cocaine while doing both that the Stephen King who made Maximum Overdrive appears to advise he slows it down a little. Exec slips into a cocaine-fueled coma. He wakes in 2020 wanting the movie in his head over the last six years: a mix of those two IPS soaked to the gills in drugs. An intern tells him they have the rights to Borderlands, close enough right? The executive says to get him “the cabin movie guy, that one had insane energy” “Sam Raimi of Evil Dead?” “No!” “Drew Goddard of Cabin in the Woods? Fede Alverez of the new Evil Dead? “ “No!” “…. Eli Roth of Cabin Fever?” The intern meekly asks, as this doesn’t seem like his thing. “YES HIM.” (side note: review link to The House with a Clock Its Walls, a much better movie with Roth, Blanchett, and Black)
It’s 2021, and the now clean exec looks at what’s been given to him. “Fuck, what the hell was I thinking. Shelf this shit.” Two years later some other exec’s coke-addled brain hears Amazon is making Fallout. “Don’t we have something like that? Finish it and shit it out just about after people move on.” Eli Roth is busy with Thanksgiving so get the guy who made Deadpool. Get it close enough and dump in after Deadpool & Wolverine, try to recoup some of the 120 million dollar budget.
Okay that didn’t happen as I wrote it, the adaptation of the video game from Gearbox has been moving through fits, starts, twelve writers, and countless other creatives over the past decade. But it is true the film was completed in 2021, shelved, and finished a few years later. The unholy fusion of Guardians of the Galaxy by way of Fallout, all dipped in a giant vat of meth is also an unholy fusion of terrible filmmaking. Borderlands isn’t Madame Web bad, sorry Dakota Johnson; the internet isn’t going to let you and the killer Pepsi sign go just yet, but it is shockingly inept for having so many well-seasoned people behind it, from director Eli Roth (Tim Miller doesn’t receive credit for directing, but does get executive producer), the dozen screenwriters (credited to Joe Crombie, believed to be an Alan Smithee credit for Craig Mazin), and the cadre of Cate Blanchett, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jack Black, Kevin Hart, among others.
It’s quite simply an ugly, cliche-ridden mess of trying to stitch together a cohesive project out of a massive pile of near-unusable footage. Note: when a film resorts to multiple voiceovers through the film after an info-dump start (that practically screams the reveals of any potential surprises), you know you have a mess on your hands. I don’t know if I should blame or pity the editors for how choppy the editing is, they may have had only scraps to work with and a negative amount of days trying to make it work. Whoever is to blame, it’s whiplash-inducing, feeling like frames were removed in the scene.
While we’re talking technical things, Borderlands is an ugly film. I’m reminded of the early 90s when production design leaned into “obvious sets because it worked in Batman, but we don’t know how to make it work here.” That’s what we’re working with, poorly planned and built worlds that look so fake it took me right out of the movie. Worse so while we do have the practical, much of it is a 2003-era obvious green-screen composite with poor CG. Between the slapdash cutting and the terrible effects work, action sequences become a blurry mishmash of chaos.
I’ve not played the games, just as I hadn’t for Uncharted in 2022. But that’s no matter. A film or TV property should stand apart. The player of these games might have a better understanding of the world, some characters, locations, and such, but there should be nothing to keep the new-to-the-property viewer from entering the world. While there were a multitude of lines, actions, and the like that do feel “If I played it, I would get this”, (the younger guy sitting to my left was my barometer in these game ties with his murmurings). The film’s issues do not stem from being “for the fans.” (looking at you Five Nights with Freddy’s filmmakers.) A bad movie is a bad movie, no matter who is watching it or where it comes from.
Plus, apparently, so many of the characters, plot, and other characteristics are changed so it doesn’t matter anyway. Let’s go over our guardians, as it is in this galaxy. Bounty hunter Lilith (half-amused Cate Blanchett in a bad wig) is recruited by Atlas (Edward Ramirez, who acts like he just got up from a nap) to head to her old home of a shithole planet, Pandora (festooned with the same sort of satiric retro-future signage and desert landscape of Fallout). She left as a youth at the insistence of her dead mom, a “vault hunter”, one of many looking for a hidden cache of something left by a long-gone alien race (now I want to watch Forbidden Planet). There she is meant to find Atlas’s wayward daughter, Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) written as a spunky sociopath but comes off just annoying. Interesting to see Greenblatt younger than she was in last year’s Barbie for most of the movie; occasionally she ages a few years, and then back again. Sometimes within a scene as if we won’t notice. (We will.) She’s protected by soldier Roland (Kevin Hart, for once not yelling he’s short every few minutes; but also trying to be Super Serious, you guys, which does not work) and Kreig, a masked psycho of some sort (Florian Munteanu reading all his lines in a way that sounds like he’s quoting the game, hell might even be soundbites ripped direct in how ADR they sound). Okay, here’s one bit where not knowing the game lore has left me wondering “What’s the deal with these guys?” Rounding to the team are exposition dropper and master mechanic Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis, adopting a distracting artificially high voice for half her lines for some reason) and the best of them all, Claptrap, a robot that hates everyone (Jack Black).
Of these folks, only Jack Black even gives more of an occasional hint of having a good time. But since he’s just voiceover, it must have been much easier for him.
They all end up on a fetch quest, such a basic straightforward thing that I’m shocked after all the writing and rewriting, shooting, and reshooting that’s the best they can come up with. A sign of how much of a mess it all is? The pile of Deus Ex Machina is tall enough to reach orbit. where people just appear and others just know things. Plot points, backgrounds, and needs just come out of nowhere, particularly in the finale. I expect a film to take some shortcuts, but holy shit. On a similar note – need an action scene, suddenly the location is now filled with cannon fodder! Never mind that we just took a lot of work and tech to enter a mine (one of dozens in the flick, like the Third Doctor Who and his quarries) which we’ve repeated has one way in and out and hasn’t been opened in a long ass time. Let’s fill the area behind the second locked forever door with some Ultra Psycho people to try to kill our heroes and manufacture an action scene.
Will they survive? Yup. With nary a scratch. They get shot at and stabbed at point blank range, and other nasty situations and falls, but no one ever gets hurt in the slightest. The plot armor is unusually thick. They all have Godmode enabled. Hell, at one point they are literally given magic plot armor for a little while. It’s insulting.
Some, or even many, of these things can be ignored if the movie is good enough. We expect logic jumps, characters surviving insane situations, strange plot issues, some performers rather than being in a better movie (Blanchett is said to have spent most of her time here preparing for TAR), and other sins. But coming together all at once makes for a terrible time at the movies. Borderlands is meant to be an action-sci-fi-comedy but drops the ball on each of them. It’s a disaster of jumbled nothing. It’s too bad it isn’t unintentionally funny like Madame Web, but a long sigh of disappointment. Borderlands is borderline unwatchable.
F
