Is Borderlands the worst film of the year? It’s definitely in contention – so laughably bad, in fact, that it feels like being catapulted back to a time when video game adaptations were a byword for mediocrity rather than the prestige vehicles they are now.
But here we are: it’s 2024, and somebody has seen fit to greenlight around $100m to make this terrible live action adaptation of the beloved 2009 game franchise. Following adaptations such as The Last of Us, Fallout and Arcane, Borderlands simply doesn’t cut it.
There is an impressively good cast for a film this impressively awful. Topping the bill is Cate Blanchett, whose droll semi-Southern American twang reverberates in our ears via voiceover from the start.
She’s playing Lilith, a woman possessed of a shock of red hair and a punky attitude in place of a personality. She’s a bounty hunter who makes her living bringing in criminals, and when ultra-rich tycoon Atlas (Édgar Ramírez) rocks up at her door she accepts his commission to go hunt down his spunky daughter Tina (Ariana Greenblatt).
Soon enough, we end up in the territory of the actual Borderland games: the planet of Pandora, a desert wasteland that is said to be the home to the Vault, a mythical repository of knowledge left behind by the ancient Eritheans.
Or something like that. To be honest, the plot doesn’t make much sense, and the film doesn’t like to waste time on explaining anything that don’t make it into the massive expositional dumps delivered by Blanchett.
What we do know is that at some point Lilith runs into Tina, her bodyguard Krieg (Florian Munteanu) and soldier Roland, played by an uncharacteristically serious Kevin Hart.
Soon enough, they’ve teamed up and are trying to track down the Vault for themselves, for reasons that never become clear beyond, “if we can get it before the baddies, we can stop the baddies from using it for evil”.
Oh, and Jack Black is there too, playing the rabidly cheerful robot Claptrap, who (to be fair to him) is probably the best part of the entire film, barring one horrendous scene where he defecates bullets. And is that Jamie Lee Curtis too? The list of stars go on.
As the heroes careen onwards, they encounter all sorts of imaginatively dressed baddies, most of them wearing Jason Voorhees-style masks and rocking homicidal attitudes to match. Clearly they’re in great danger. But don’t worry, we never actually get attached enough to any of them to care. They’re just not that well-written – rather they’re just an assembled collection of tropes.
Even Blanchett, who is the main character, feels paper thin, left to make the most of hackneyed dialogue such as, “I’m too old for this shit,” which seems to be repeated every other line – guys, are you really pulling out Lethal Weapon references almost 40 years on from its release?
The writing itself (courtesy of director Eli Roth – yes, the creator of the horror series Hostel – and Joe Crombie) is just as bad, and that’s before we hit the third act “plot twist”, which could be seen coming a mile off and yet still became so cartoonishly awful so quickly that mutters of “oh my God” were audible in the cinema when I watched. Whoever cast an actress as talented as Blanchett in a role as bad should face serious repercussions.
Maybe in 2009, when the bar was through the floor, Borderlands could have passed as a semi-decent video game adaptation. These days, that isn’t going to fly.
It borrows all its best bits from other films, and it knows it: the setting from Mad Max, the tone from Fallout, the helmets from Star Wars and Cate Blanchett from literally any other film she’s been in. Here’s a recommendation: save yourself the bother of watching this, and watch one of those other films instead.
