Borderlands (2024) Review!!

Synopsis – Based on the best-selling videogame, this all-star action-adventure follows a ragtag team of misfits on a mission to save a missing girl who holds the key to unimaginable power.

My Take – While video-game adaptations for decades maintained a reputation of being terrible, with minor blips here and there, Max‘s The Last of Us, Netflix‘s Arcane and Prime Video‘s Fallout TV series managed to surprise everyone by being what only one can classify them to be: high quality works.

Even feature adaptions, in the past few years, particularly The Super Mario Bros. Film (2023) and Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023), too have managed to turn the tide by making a killing it at the box office, breaking multiple records upon release. Seemingly making it the right time to finally release the much-delayed take on Gearbox Software‘s beloved looter-shooter franchise.

Since the release of the first game back in 2009, the series has gone on to become one of the best-selling video game franchises in history. Taking place within a sci-fi western setting, the games are held in high regard by players due to their distinctive art-style, first-person shooter mechanics, co-operative game-play, and quirky sense of humor.

And although I only possess a surface level knowledge of the lore, it was easy to point out how this inexcusably dull, one-dimensional chore of a film fails to provide anything remotely interesting worth watching for neither longtime fans nor newcomers.

Instead of being the “Guardians of the Galaxy“-adjacent ensemble action-comedy it so clearly wants to be, the film ends up playing out as a dull throwback to the previous era of utterly dire video game flicks, about whom the less spoken the better.

Even given a property with a lot of potential for cinematic mayhem, an all-star cast, and a seemingly large amount of resources to pull from, director Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, Hostel), who co-wrote the film with Joe Crombie, still succumbs to tedium and grating clichés at every turn.

Instead of feeling like an immersive dive into the otherwise interesting universe, it comes off as a shallow, lazy cash grab that misses the essence of what made the games special. Failing to find ways to set itself apart from every other PG-13 action comedy out there.

However, it seems like Roth’s not only to blame, though he has a good enough list of stinkers to his name, as rumors suggest that production saw the Thankgiving (2023) director being replaced by Tim Miller, director of Deadpool (2016) and Terminator: Dark Fate (2019), who apparently re-shot most of the end product. Even writer Craig Mazin (Chernobyl, The Last of Us) had his name removed from the credits as well. Let’s just say, the adaption is not exactly the trailing glory it believes it to be.

Beginning with a prologue that reveals about an ancient alien race called the Eridians, who once inhabited the planet of Pandora, and a Vault where the secrets of their lost civilization’s advanced technology are kept, the story follows Lilith (Cate Blanchett), a dangerous, anti-social, and capable bounty hunter, who is hired by Atlas (Edgar Ramírez), the most powerful industrialist in the galaxy.

Her job being to find his teenage daughter, Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), whose lineage can help him unlock the hidden treasure trove of ancient alien technology people have attempted to locate for eons. Believed to be kidnapped by Roland (Kevin Hart), a mercenary soldier apparently gone rogue, Lilith grudgingly accepts the job, even if it means returning to her old home planet of Pandora, which has since become a wasteland of thieves, scum, and villainy.

And once there she finds out that the teenage demolitions expert is in no great rush to return to the loving arms of daddy, but was instead rescued by Roland, is now under the protection of Krieg (Florian Munteanu), a hulking, mask wearing psycho and is looking to open the Vault herself.

Soon enough, Lilith reluctantly aligns herself with a ragtag crew of misfits to aid in her mission that also includes the jovial robot Claptrap (voiced by Jack Black), and scientist and Dr. Patricia Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), as they fight their way through numerous aliens and other dangerous foes, while setting aside their differences and work together as a team.

The entire plot of misfits coming together to forge an alliance to protect their universe is a premise you have seen multiple times. Imagine a combination of ‘Guardians of the Galaxy‘ and ‘Suicide Squad‘ in a planet called Pandora that instead of resembling the vast beauties of the ‘Avatar’ films, looks like a scrapped version of the ‘Mad Max‘ films. And that too without the thrills, stimulating action and humor.

Yes, director Roth really tries hard to make this film feel epic and insane but it all just comes off tedious at the end. Its approach on the humor, atmosphere and character dynamics just lack the necessary charms.

The film’s biggest flaw is that its band of characters does not work together. Whether this is a direction/cast chemistry issue or an issue with the way their dynamic is written in the script is unclear, but they are never believable as a team. Although dysfunction can sometimes be entertaining in itself, the characters’ personalities aren’t developed enough for the film to work in this regard, either.

The film relies heavily on the interpersonal banter between the characters, especially Black as the Claptrap, who delivers some juvenile humor and Greenblatt’s sass and enthusiasm. But, for the most part, it finds it hard to hold on to the chaos that is essentially the main crux of this story. Even though the comedy of the film is an almost utter failure, one could almost forgive if the action was exciting.

Unfortunately, apart from one car chase in the second act that uses its setting in an intriguing way, the action sequences are as dull and generic as the story. Even the hyper-stylized flair of the games is replicated only on the most superficial level, and with a PG-13 rating, all the limb-severing gore, dirty-minded humor, and uniquely deranged themes are replaced by recycled blandness geared toward mass marketability.

Performance wise, Cate Blanchett tries her best to be as tough and mysterious as possible as Lilith, but she’s so thinly written that you’d be hard-pressed finding anything relatable about her character. Kevin Hart is woefully miscast as Roland. It’s clear from the film’s tone that they want to recapture the magic of something like the last two Jumanji films, but casting Hart as a straight-laced character with almost no jokes was a serious mistake.

Barbie breakout star Ariana Greenblatt doesn’t fare much better as fan-favorite character Tiny Tina. Her attempts at jokes are consistently unfunny and annoying. It also doesn’t help that Greenblatt’s character is the worst-written in the script, functioning as a human MacGuffin with a backstory that doesn’t make much sense and an arc that is effectively rendered meaningless by Lilith’s.

Jamie Lee Curtis fails to make much of an impression, giving a painfully nondescript performance. Edgar Ramírez is laughably bad as the exaggerated capitalist villain. And as Krieg, another well-known face of the franchise, Florian Munteanu feels like he’s doing his best attempt at a Drax impersonation, just without any of the charm. Then there’s the case of Jack Black, who annoyingly provides the voice of a robot that eagerly follows Lilith throughout her journey.

In smaller roles, Haley Bennett, Gina Gershon, Janina Gavankar, Bobby Lee, Benjamin Byron Davis, Olivier Richters, Charles Babalola, Ryann Redmond, Steven Boyer and Cheyenne Jackson are wasted. On the whole, ‘Borderlands’ is an absolutely mediocre video game adaptation that is as generic and disposable as they come.