Movie Borderlands Review

Borderlands isn't an especially funny franchise, so it's perhaps fitting this Eli Roth (Hostel) adaptation lacks laughs. The most puzzling thing about this picture is how it managed to assemble such an all-star cast: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, and Jamie Lee Curtis all unite to attempt to bring character to some of the most vanilla personalities in video game history. They largely fail.

We were lucky (?) enough to be invited to an early media screening of the movie ahead of its US release on 9th August. Wading through crowds of overdressed influencers at London's Leicester Square, we were ushered into Tiny Tina's Funfair, where we were encouraged to toss boots at toy rabbits and attempt to win some bunny ears from a claw machine.

So far, so Borderlands.

Upon taking our seat, we sat through a little over 100 minutes of lifeless sci-fi action on a screen large enough to be visible from outer-space. For those not familiar with Gearbox's game franchise, the best point of pop culture comparison is probably Guardians of the Galaxy, as a band of ragtag vault hunters embark on a mission to open a MacGuffin magical crypt in search of… Well, no one really knows, to be honest.

Lilith (Blanchett) is the main character, a flame-haired bounty hunter with a backstory that unsubtly unfolds. A chance bar brawl concludes with her being tasked with recovering Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), whose turn as the effervescent tween is mercifully less eardrum destroying than Ashly Burch's version, and a little more likeable as a result.

Space marine Roland (Hart) is also trying to find Tina, and in the process has broken masked psycho Krieg (Florian Munteanu) out of prison. However, rather than return her to shady space executive Atlas (Edgar Ramírez), the makeshift team decide to work together to track down a trio of vault keys themselves, in order to prevent the unscrupulous CEO from obtaining its contents. And that's more or less it.

The group pick up Dr Patricia Tannis (Curtis) along the way, but she's only really utilised to drop exposition when required. Krieg – who's basically an analogue for Drax with none of Dave Bautista's comic timing – may as well not exist, and Hart's performance is surprisingly low on energy throughout. Blanchett, a great actress, does try – but even she can't really save this.

Claptrap, a silly robotic sidekick, is introduced fairly early on to bring comic relief – but we weren't even aware it was the always-reliable Jack Black voicing him until the end credits. There are a couple of one-liners that land, but the big gags fall embarrassingly flat. One scene, after being hosed with machine guns, sees him excrete the bullets. It's funny because he's pooing, apparently.

It's obvious where the movie's going before it reaches its anticlimactic conclusion, and a final face-off against villain Atlas lacks tension because he's barely on screen for five minutes. Apart from some brief exchanges between Lilith and Tina, no one really has any motivation or personality here, they just shuffle from scene-to-scene because they're paid to be there.

We were also surprised by how little the movie explores Borderlands' main features. The games, for example, are loot shooters where acquiring different guns with unique statistics is a big part of the appeal. We'd expected the film to emphasize this, but the shootouts are largely forgettable affairs, chaotically shot to the point where it's difficult to even follow what's going on.

These action sequences are set to songs like Ace of Spades, making for the most predictable set-pieces you could possibly imagine. One scene, with heavy use of CG, sees Roland drive a car straight through a giant space bug's throat. The execution is perfectly fine, but you've seen this kind of thing 1,000 times before.

By the time the credits rolled, we felt pretty empty inside. Borderlands' problem isn't necessarily that it's bad – it's just really bland. The jokes don't really hit, the action's meh, and the story goes nowhere. Blanchett tries and Greenblatt is fine, but no one else really turns up. It left us wondering: why does this movie exist? And, perhaps more pertinently, why did Roth waste an all-star cast on a series as narratively limp as Borderlands?