In the distended field of movies and TV spun out of video games, there are blockbusters like Sonic the Hedgehog and The Super Mario Bros. Movie, long-running franchises like Resident Evil and lauded viewer favorites like The Last of Us. Many of them gain commercial traction — even a critically savaged dud like Assassin’s Creed did respectable business internationally. But there are just as many that probably should have been left on the console, like the role-playing first-person shooter game, Borderlands. Humor hasn’t generally been director Eli Roth’s strong suit, but neither is the constant bang-kapow of gunfire, explosions and violence in this stale and stubbornly unexciting sci-fi action comedy.
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The big mystery is how such a noisy nothing of a movie landed the stacked cast, led by Cate Blanchett with as much conviction as the material merits. Borderlands was shot in 2021, immediately before Blanchett did Tár, and boy, was that an upgrade. Reshoots in 2023 were directed by Tim Miller, since Roth was committed to Thanksgiving.
Borderlands
To be fair, the project for which Blanchett and other major names signed on possibly looked a little different given the number of screenwriting hands it passed through. The most notable of those belonged to Craig Mazin, a co-creator and co-writer of The Last of Us, who reportedly chose to remove his name from the project. The script credit ultimately went to Roth and first-timer Joe Crombie, with speculation that the latter is a pseudonym.
Over some opening solar system screensaver, we learn that an advanced alien race known as the Eridians once presided over the galaxy. The extinct civilization’s vast knowledge — including weapons technology — is believed to be hidden in a vault on the planet Pandora.
According to a prophecy, a daughter of Pandora would one day open the vault and restore order to the planet, which has been decimated by mining corporation wars. It’s now a scorched land of industrial debris and toxic chemical waste, inhabited by lowlife scavengers, thugs, bandit gangs, vault hunters and the oppressive Crimson Lance militia. Pandora is also home to the deadly thresher species, ferocious monsters that look like the tentacled offspring of Godzilla and a Dune sandworm.
Blanchett plays Lilith, a cool-as-a-cucumber bounty hunter with killer cheekbones, a bright red flip (think Run Lola Run with a comb) and a quick trigger finger prone to the swift dispatch of any nuisance. Against her better judgment she’s coerced by shady corporate overlord Atlas (Edgar Ramirez), or a glitchy hologram of him, into traveling to Pandora. Her task is to retrieve Atlas’ missing preteen daughter, Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt, pre-Barbie), whom he claims was kidnapped by a member of his security force.
“It’s a shithole,” says Lilith on arrival. “I should know. I was born here.” That means lots of bad associations and unresolved issues, not that anyone should expect psychological depth or genuine human feeling from this script.
Lilith, despite her attempts to shake him off, gets stuck with Claptrap, an annoying mono-wheeled junkyard robot voiced by Jack Black, who says the ominous words: “I’m programmed for humor.” The yappy droid’s data quickly leads her to Tina, a demolitionist with a seemingly endless supply of grubby plush-toy bunnies rigged to explode. The bounty hunter just wants to grab the girl and get out of there, but her assignment turns out to be not so simple.
Tiny Tina is less irritating than Claptrap, though she mostly made me miss Chloë Grace Moretz in Kick-Ass. She has teamed up with rogue soldier Roland (Kevin Hart) and Krieg (Florian Munteanu), a semi-literate hulk in a gas mask who serves as her protector. Once they stop trying to kill Lilith, the band of misfits flee together from Commander Knox (Janina Gavankar) and her Crimson Lance goon squad.
They get intel on a contact from Moxxi, the proprietor of a Sanctuary City bar whose style cue seems to be “sexy Mad Hatter’s tea party.” There’s some moderate fun watching Gina Gershon channel Mae West in the role, spiced with a dash of Cristal Connors.
Next to join the band is eccentric xenoarcheologist Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), who thereafter functions mainly to warn everyone any time bad shit is about to go down. But she serves a purpose by showing Lilith a painting the bounty hunter did as a child of the Firehawk, a flame-winged Eridian goddess virtually announced as a coming attraction for the final showdown.
If all this sounds like a cut-rate Guardians of the Galaxy grafted onto Mad Max territory with a smidgen of Star Wars, that’s exactly what it is, with a grungy visual aesthetic that doesn’t give it much life. Pursued by Knox and clearly destined for a faceoff with Atlas, whose connection to Tina is not quite what he claimed, the fugitives go from one shoot-’em-up to the next without building momentum. Some fussy business around the search for three vault keys adds nothing in the way of suspense.
Since the characters remain one-dimensional — not much more than cartoonish gamer avatars — we’re never terribly invested in their survival, or their quest to get to the vault first. This also means that when lone wolf Lilith gradually develops maternal feelings toward Tina and a fondness for her found family, the emotion feels like programmatic script mechanics, unconvincing and unearned, despite the accompaniment of literal fireworks.
Roth’s messy storytelling is so anxious to get to the next blast of rote action — amped up by Steve Jablonsky’s hard-working synth and orchestral score and lots of shoddy CGI — that the characters have scant opportunity to form real bonds.
That makes this a thankless job for the actors. Blanchett appears to enjoy striding around in slinky leatherwear with holsters strapped across her hips ready for some lightning-fast gunslinging. But the role is thinly drawn, cut from a familiar template of tough, cynical, cool-headed female action figures. Any hope for more of the campy authority Blanchett brought to Thor: Ragnarok goes unrewarded.
Hart’s natural humor is oddly tamped down, or maybe that’s just because his dialogue is so uninteresting, and Black’s voice work is grating and unfunny, made worse by Claptrap’s insistence on bursting into song and dance. When a comedy relies for laughs on things like a robot taking gunfire and then defecating bullets it’s in trouble. Blanchett and Black worked with Roth on The House With a Clock in Its Walls, so they shouldn’t be surprised by how under-directed the entire cast appears to be here.
It’s conceivable that longtime fans of the video game might get more out of Borderlands, but I wouldn’t count on it. At one point, Claptrap returns to operational mode after a heavy-weaponry assault and says, “I blacked out. Did something important happen?” Not in this movie.
