After first contact with fans yesterday, critics are somehow even more disappointed with the Borderlands movie. They hate it. They don't even give it credit as "so bad it's good." It is simply, by all appearances, a truly and extremely bad movie. It holds a remarkable 3% approval on aggregator Rotten Tomatoes as of press time. Without further improvement that will place Borderlands at a comfortable midpoint on RT's 100 worst movies of all time list… and at first place on their Worst Blockbusters of All Time list—below even 2010's disastrous The Last Airbender.
Perhaps the choicest Borderlands smackdown was delivered by Rolling Stone, where reviewer David Fear called it "an insult to gamers, movie lovers, and carbon-based life forms." Which I think is unnecessarily harsh judgment on the tastes of theoretical Silicon-Oxygen-Fluorine biochemistry life forms. They would also hate the Borderlands movie.
"You seriously wonder if the sole purpose of Borderlands is to make every other video game adaptation look a thousand times better in comparison," says Fear. Later saying that "It is, in no uncertain terms, a horrendous waste of time, talent, and pixels. Not even the pleasure of seeing Blanchett twirling pistols and kicking ass can salvage this."
On home turf at IGN, where you might expect a videogame movie to do better, Borderlands failed to land, earning an "Awful" rating from reviewer Matt Donato, who noted that it failed to live up to any of the promise the games hold. The fun locales are there, but they're "all spoonfed, familiar, and as filling as a single rice cake."
Even Variety failed to find anything lovable: "By the time 'Borderlands' unlocks its vault, not even the characters seem to care what’s inside," said Peter Debruge.
What I found to be the finest summary of critic views, however, comes from The Wrap via writer William Bibbiani. Bibbiani's review notes all the ways in which Borderlands tries to be like other, better films and fails rather than finding its own voice derived from the games.
"The biggest problem with Eli Roth’s 'Borderlands' isn’t that it’s bad," says Bibbiani, "it’s that it’s not interesting enough to be bad. It’s mass-produced pabulum. All the edges have been sanded down so it can be safe and mainstream, but they went too far and there’s almost nothing left. It’s technically a movie based on 'Borderlands.' Not much else."
We'll see if Borderlands' box office numbers can hold up to its aspirations, but I think we all expect that it's not going to take off there either.
