Three years after it completed principal photography, Borderlands arrives in theaters on Friday, August 9, and it doesn’t take long to understand the delay.
Headlined by Cate Blanchett in a role that gives new meaning to the term generic, this adaptation of Gearbox Software’s video game series desperately wants to be Guardians of the Galaxy but has no interest in—much less skill at—concocting a unique story or fleshed-out characters. Merely a skeleton of superior ancestors, writer/director Eli Roth’s fiasco is so drearily routine and slapdash that even an A.I. would deem it too plagiaristic.
Set in a galaxy, far, far away from originality, Borderlands opens with a Star Wars riff in which rebel soldier Roland (Kevin Hart) rescues imprisoned maiden Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) from a starship with the aid of hulking behemoth Krieg (Florian Munteanu), who wears a mask, growls a lot of inanities, and is known as a “psycho.”
