Directed By Eli Roth

Starring – Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black

The Plot – Lilith (Blanchett), an infamous bounty hunter with a mysterious past, reluctantly returns to her home, Pandora, the most chaotic planet in the galaxy. Her mission is to find the missing daughter of Atlas (Edgar Ramírez), the universe’s most powerful S.O.B. Lilith forms an unexpected alliance with a ragtag team of misfits: Roland (Hart), a seasoned mercenary on a mission; Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), a feral preteen demolitionist; Krieg (Florian Munteanu), Tina’s musclebound protector; Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), the oddball scientist who’s seen it all; and Claptrap (Black), a wiseass robot. Together, these unlikely heroes must battle an alien species and dangerous bandits to uncover one of Pandora’s most explosive secrets. The fate of the universe could be in their hands, but they’ll be fighting for something more: each other

Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, adult language and some suggestive material.

Borderlands (2024) Official Trailer – Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black (youtube.com)

POSITIVES

Perhaps it’s a backhanded compliment, but the nicest thing that I can say about ‘Borderlands’ is it isn’t quite the full-fledged nightmare that people have made it out to be, with a few key elements saving it from being among the year’s worst films. For starters, if Roth successfully grasps one thing, it’s the video game emulation that he transfers seamlessly to the screen, with several missions inside of this screenplay constantly unearthing an important relic, or traveling to exotic landscapes, in the same vein as those of a video game structure. For anyone familiar with video game adaptation movies, it’s a safe road to walk in structure, especially considering so many of these scripts feel interchangeable with one another, however the adventurous elements do force the script to continuously keep moving forward, and with a corresponding lore and world-building that play so close to the chest with what this movie is unraveling, it’s easy to see and appreciate how simplicity was definitely the way to go. Likewise, Roth does properly manufacture tangibility in the look and feel of Pandora as this crumbling ruins full of colorfully eccentric characters and wild west danger. From the vibrancy of the presentation enacting a splashing of three-dimensional color in every frame, with lived-in production values of wardrobe and set decoration, to varieties of tribes that make up the land, Roth definitely concerned himself with the lore that has spawned legions of fans, in turn giving them ample scenery to continuously chew on, when all else fails. Lastly, the performances are a mixed dish, but I found the efforts of Blanchett and Black to be most bold, especially with a script and ensuing characterization that does nobody any favors in this film. Black plays it safe to the chest with eccentric deliveries as a voice actor that will earn a slight chuckle or two out of the audience, especially within the consistency of his sarcastic deliveries, and Blanchett, while a bit despisable as a character who continuously shoots first and asks questions later, certainly brings imposing nature to her portrayal, both in the stoic nature of her design that never withers under the circumstances, as well as the resiliency that does see her in a surprising amount of physicality.

NEGATIVES

Back when the trailer for ‘Borderlands’ debuted, I certified it as a ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ poser, and while the problems with this movie are far greater than being derivative, the outline of its formula simply can’t be overlooked, resulting in an obvious desperation in sampling that keeps it from ever finding a unique voice of its own. From the boisterously obnoxious classic rock heavy soundtrack, with no lyrical context to what is sampled, to this gang of societal losers who come together to make a family by film’s end, to even the aforementioned splashes of exuberant color, Roth clearly had one film in mind when making this, and drove the point home endlessly, with the elements of humor and characterization feeling like its biggest distancing to that far superior predecessor. PG-13 already puts any film into a handicap, but the gags in ‘Borderlands’ don’t just fail, they bomb so loud that you can still hear them implode in a forest that you’re not even standing in, and while comedy is mostly subjective to varying audiences, I can assure that nobody will remember any of the lines of dialogue, even five minutes after they leave this movie. As for the characters, they’re mostly detestable when the script chooses to focus even a shred of time to their development, but especially Blanchett’s Lilith, and Greenblatt’s Tiny Tina, who very well might be my least favorite character of the entire cinematic year. I say this because they overtly obnoxious her design, with crude behavior and try-hard dialogue that made me wish these characters would dump her in a river, but can’t because the film makes the traumatic decision to base the entire plot around her. Kevin Hart and Jamie Lee Curtis phone their performances in long distance, perhaps as a result of Roth’s own uninspiring grasp on such monumental personalities, but maybe just the amount of ridiculous dialogue that each of them are forced to deliver, with Curtis lacking any kind of commitment or range to long-winded exposition dumps, and Hart practically narrating the movie whenever a visual in the previous scene requires him echoing it, so that the audience doesn’t misinterpret what it means. Ramirez’s antagonist, if you can call him that, is every bit forgettable as he is conspicuous by his absence, introduced near the beginning of the film, then never seen again until the very end, leaving the stakes undersold, and the urgency non-existent in a film that structurally just lingers. On top of it all, the action falls tragically flat, no matter how many edits they make to a scene, or how loud they pump the volume from an unnecessary soundtrack. While part of my problem with the sequences certainly lends itself to the way they’re shot, with unappealing angles, and distant proximity to their capture, the bigger issue is in the lack of impact that they effectively conjure, with no kind of technical mastery or earth-shattering pay-off to transfer some of the speed and intensity to a bored audience. It comes to a head during the third act climax, with lifeless C.G that smothers the integrity of the sequence, with artificiality so heavy that green-screen feels like a character of its own in the film. This scrubbed and unflattering consistency equally lends itself to all of the physicality of the movie, with bloodless, painless impacts that somehow makes this dangerous world feel scrubbed from any of the ferocity that persisted in the games, with about as much edge to its portrayal as a Disney movie. This is especially surprising for Roth, whose gratuitous impulses could’ve instilled the devastating darkness to this world that needed such toxicity, but instead it persists as the kind of wacky and zany movie that you would see in a Disney movie, which of course is the biggest injustice to the origin of its games, as an envelope-pusher of the TV-14 rating that it’s always saddled with. Last but certainly not least, not all problems belong to Roth, as the typical studio-approved 90 minute run time limits all of the characters and ensuing world-building about this place, leaving it all style, and void of any substance. As to where a show like ‘Fallout’ took ample time fleshing out its world and corresponding characters, as way to appraise value to the overhanging stakes, those in ‘Borderlands’ don’t make the world feel any more compelling, or the games any more urgently sought after to pursue and play, especially with so many unique and fascinating elements to its sociology glossed over to make this feel like an audacious first step to a franchise that Roth nor his producers will ever experience.

OVERALL
‘Borderlands’ is another for the pile of uninteresting and underwhelming adaptations of popular video games, but this time with a star-studded ensemble, who go tragically wasted at the hands of Roth’s stagnant direction. While the film does show glimpses of a better movie that is practically begging to rise to the surface, it’s continuously wasted by monotonously derivative execution and shallow exploration that gets us no closer to the source material, resulting in another lifeless corpse for the cinematic graveyard that is August.

My Grade: 3/10 or F+