I left my viewing of the Borderlands movie consumed by two thoughts. The first: My cinema was more packed than I thought it would be at 3:30 pm on a Thursday, and my local community will now surely tar me as a man who paid real-life British pounds to go and see a film currently boasting a hot 7% on Rotten Tomatoes (up from 0%). The second: What kind of foul trick did known magician Randy Pitchford pull on Cate Blanchett and Jamie Lee Curtis to get them to star in it?
Borderlands is not good. It is bad. This will not be news to you. It's in the headlines and in the Twitter posts and in the glazed eyes of audiences pouring out of screenings across the globe. You might have heard the claim that this is a righting of the scale, the karmic rebalance after five-star videogame adaptations like The Last of Us and Fallout. A real Uwe Boll-style stinker to cleanse our palates and remind us that good adaptations are the exception, not the rule. We needed a new Super Mario Bros (1993).
We didn't get one. Borderlands cannot hold a candle to Super Mario Bros. It is not interestingly bad. This is not a film you should ever queue up alongside infamous masterpieces like The Room and Manos: The Hands of Fate. It's just uninspired scene after loosely connected uninspired scene, each populated by a cast of actors who also seem kind of upset about experiencing the Borderlands movie. It has no cheesy, thwarted ambition to redeem it. It never becomes more than a waste of a hundred minutes.
I think it knows that on some level. At one point, alarmingly early on, the film almost seems to get tired of itself, outlining a chunk of the plot in a Cate Blanchett voiceover while playing clips of the Oscar-winning actress tumbling through the desert shooting nameless mooks. It wasn't any better than the rest of the film but it certainly delivered narrative more efficiently, so it was probably my favourite part.
The plot of Borderlands (the movie) is, in essence, the plot of Borderlands (the game). The first game, I mean. A band of plucky outlaws are on the hunt for the legendary Eridian vault and all its wondrous precursor race techno-treasures, and they're pursued all the way by the evil Atlas Corp.
If you were reading lines as hackneyed as these you'd probably be a bit put out too
Congratulations, you now have as much emotional investment in the story of Eli Roth's Borderlands as I do after watching it. It's tempting to put that down to the performances: The main cast alternates between being mystified by the narrative and being annoyed by it. Only Jack Black's Claptrap seems to really get into it, which I suspect is because playing a CG character liberated Black from dragging himself to the set and becoming physically associated with the film.
But I can't really blame them. If you were reading lines as hackneyed as these you'd probably be a bit put out too. Cate Blanchett's bounty hunter (Lilith) actually gives us an "I'm too old for this shit" in one of her very first scenes. At one point, Tiny Tina—Ariana Greenblatt's character, barely comparable to the manic Ashly Burch performance in the games—sets up a joke you can see from space, asking Janina Gavankar's Knoxx "You and what army?" when the bad guys come to abduct her. Gavankar delivers the obvious follow-up, "The one right behind me," with such wooden uncertainty that I wondered if she too couldn't quite believe she was saying it.
It's another cliche in a film made up of them, where every character is a two-dimensional collection of overplayed tropes—world-weary bounty hunter, honourable soldier guy, whacky musclebound sidekick. That might explain why the film can't quite work out how to naturally get you invested in them, a problem it solves by simply telling you to get invested.
Take Kevin Hart's Roland, the bad-soldier-turned-good. Notionally, part of his backstory is that he once had a romantic relationship with Gavankar's evil corpo. This is never really acted out and the two barely share a scene. Instead, Borderlands has an entirely different character deliver the news directly to the camera and then sits back, satisfied it has adequately set up the emotional stakes for their encounter at the film's climax.
But hey, not to worry: That encounter is immediately undercut by a 'turning C3-PO off in the middle of his emotional speech'-style gag that wasn't funny in Rise of Skywalker and isn't funny any of the multiple times Borderlands does it, either.
Cate Blanchett has a similar thing going on, which you know because of all the times Cate Blanchett says things like 'I am sad about my relationship with my mother.' Other characters note it too: 'Cate Blanchett sure is sad about her mother,' says Jamie Lee Curtis, lips pursed in concern, 'I bet it's because of that time her mother abandoned her.' It's not a plot, it's the bullet points of a plot read aloud, and when the time comes for ol' Cate to finally make her peace with mum, it's just one more entry on a list the film has instructed you to care about. It's hard not to feel like the film can't find a reason to care about its own characters, so why should you?
The Borderlands movie's crime is not simply that it is bad. I've got room in my heart for bad. Some of my favourite things are bad. If this thing had come out and given us a new entry in the ledger of absurd, beautiful trainwrecks, you can bet that I'd be here telling you to get some friends together and give it a shot. Watching something shoot for the moon and end up in the gutter has a charm all its own.
But it's not just bad, it's bland. Tasteless mush that no one involved seemed interested in saving. The entire thing has the feeling of creative writing homework completed just before the deadline, a collection of overworn tropes stretched to fill a word count, or a studio-mandated length of at least an hour and a half. The only compliment I can truly give it is that it's an excuse to buy a bucket of popcorn. Be warned, though: The popcorn will run out long before the film is over, leaving you to confront the weight of the Borderlands movie in a dark cinema, alone.
Or not quite alone. Like I said, my theatre was discomfitingly crowded, giving me the disconcerting impression it could end up a (relative) box office success. So look forward to Borderlands 2, coming to cinemas near you whether you want it or not. God help us all.
