Returning to her home planet, an infamous outlaw forms an unexpected alliance with a team of unlikely heroes. Together, they battle alien monsters and dangerous bandits to find a missing girl who h...
Another day, another live action video game movie adaptation barreling through multiple reshoots, writers and conflicting visions before being dumped into the wastebasket. “Borderlands” seemed tailor-made for the silver screen despite the games not being heavily story-driven but naturally, the negative feedback that followed isn’t surprising.
I wanted to walk out of this t’s not a complete trainwreck (thankfully) but it still ain’t good.
This is not a good introduction to Eli Roth. The man’s more comfortable in R-rated territory but he somehow feels both pigeon-holded and complacent in with how everything turned out. Half-assed, flat and uninspired in every which way, Eli’s direction gave off the impression he did not want to be there.
A decent job is done replicating the punk sci-fi aesthetic from the games and there are certain splices of quasi-intriguing worldbuilding you can pick apart from the production design but not only does most of what we actually see hardly ever pop off the screen or come alive, you’re just reminded of other properties that did this wasteland aesthetic better. The spaces are more enclosed than the movies about ACTUAL DESERTS and the scope and scale of this story don’t co-align with each other because of that.
It’s thankfully brief at only 102 minutes but its manic pace is a double-edged sword; dumping the filler and sticks to the while simultaneously assuring the film gets no chance to slow down and properly establish anything. Rogier Stoffers’s cinematography barely strangles enough maneuverability for passable viewing but sacrifices consistent lighting and/or deft editing in the process. Action sequences are as routine as they come with maybe one noticeable exception but they have to juggle horribly noticeable green screen (seriously Hollywood, how have you not fixed that?) paired alongside fairly decent CG and special effects and it brings out the worst kind of maximalism a project can have. Costume design is genuinely remarkable, the musical score is about as disposable as I expected and the less I bring up the juvenile humor, the better off I’ll be. It does not harken back to that old-fashioned, almost Vaudevillian sense of comedy the games reveled in and many of these jokes, you’ve already heard before or are let down by remedial dialogue.
The content these games normally douse themselves in already make an ironclad justification for an R-rating so naturally what you wanna do is dial it down to PG-13….and it feels unnatural. Feels like watching the basic cable edit of something R-rated; you can tell it wasn’t originally going to be like this and they basically admitted to removing the graphic content in post-production.
Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart (yes, really) and Ariana Greenblatt are the only decent performers here once they’re given something to do; the rest of the cast varies and most of the characters do not stand out beyond fulfilling basic archetypes.
Seven different writers had their names attached to this project so keep that in mind while trying to dissect the baffling construction of this plot structure and the complete lack of imagination that comes with the writing. Between the familiar set-up and its stilted execution, there isn’t a whole lot I can add to what you probably already know. Its a blatant Guardians of the Galaxy rip-off, somehow even more blatantly lazy than Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League some-fucking-how because at least they have personalities in that game; this script couldn’t even be bothered to give any of these characters any interesting quirk to help them stand out. There is barely any depth to what the story tries to squeeze out; it’s just a pretty run-of-the-mill treasuring hunting plot that’s scattered, shallow, and takes shortcuts to try and cram everything below two hours. Not really anything special, not really any major surprises or twists and the one "twist" there is is so telegraphed that I don't think you can even call it a twist.
Plus, if I’m recalling the events of the first game correctly, that means the timeline was out of wack from the first few minutes onwards and it takes the film out of semi-grounded territory in a very lopsided fashion.
The narrative’s clearly been tampered with via reshoots and then hacked to pieces in the editing room, resulting in a final product that's more than happy to speed through itself; inept at providing and following through with visceral, escapist entertainment in and out of the guns-and-punches department. However, that does mean its current form can be cheap junk food cinema at its most disposable as it's just about entertaining enough for one viewing and then harmless enough to be quickly forgotten about afterwards.
Desensitizing, arbitrary and mindlessly chaotic in its bid to entertain, Borderlands’ only crime is one of mediocrity. At its best, it’s a low effort botch-job that does nothing to distinguish itself from every other team-up story released within the past few decades or represent the franchise it’s apart of at its best. And at its worst, it’s more or less the same.
