We’re in a new era, one in which video game adaptations are seen as just as likely to be good as any other nerdy thing. Whereas many of us used to assume a video game movie would undoubtedly suck, at this point there have been enough good ones that the conventional wisdom has changed. Despite that general shift, the Borderlands movie feels more like a product of the old era–when most game adaptations were generic, disposable action movies at best, and frequently something worse than that. And “generic” and “disposable” is exactly what Borderlands is.
Borderlands, from Hostel director Eli Roth, is an adaptation of the sprawling game franchise set on Pandora, a hostile, desert planet full of corporations and fortune hunters trying to break into a mythical ancient vault that’s allegedly full of all sorts of amazing technology. Enter Lilith (Cate Blanchett, delivering her worst American accent), who’s been hired by a man called Atlas (Edgar Ramirez) to find his kidnapped daughter on Pandora. There’s a catch, of course–the daughter is Tiny Tina (Arianna Greenblatt), and she’s more his creation than his actual daughter, since she was engineered from the blood of ancient aliens for the purpose of opening the vault. And she wasn’t kidnapped–the Atlas soldier Roland (Kevin Hart) rescued her from her captivity.
It’s not long before Lilith catches up to them and shortly after, they’re all attacked by Atlas soldiers. Lilith then has to team up with Roland, Tina, their sympathetic psycho bandit pal, the quirky scientist Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), and the comic relief robot Claptrap to survive and find the vault themselves.
Let’s talk about Claptrap, who is probably the most iconic character from the games. The video game version of Claptrap was originally voiced by former developer at Gearbox, David Eddings, who was replaced with a soundalike in Borderlands 3. But instead of getting somebody who sounds like Claptrap, the movie has Jack Black voice the part–and it’s awful. For a few minutes near the beginning of the movie, I was kinda getting into its vibe, but as soon as Claptrap introduced himself to Lilith, the whole thing felt doomed.
It’s hard to say what the fatal flaw is in Black’s version of Claptrap–perhaps it’s that he is completely unable to match Claptrap’s established cadence or tone, and so he plays more like a new, annoying Star Wars droid. But having him there turns the whole movie askew, especially since he gets nearly all the joke attempts.
That’s a weird thing to say about a movie that stars Kevin Hart, but somehow it’s true. Borderlands is not a movie where Hart will grate with incessant jokes, because he hardly makes any. Hart plays Roland as a dry-witted action hero, and he’s pretty good at that when he’s allowed to be, but it feels like most of his key scenes are missing. Maybe this is a side effect of the movie’s PG-13 rating–the games are rated M and have plenty of blood and swearing, and Borderlands so often feels like watching the basic cable edit of something R-rated. And that smoothed-down feeling contributes to one of the film’s other biggest issues.
Borderlands comes in at a very brief 102 minutes in length, which you might be tempted to reflexively celebrate in our current landscape of hella long movies. But there’s a reason longer movies are en vogue–more time allows for more depth, and depth is what Borderlands is missing the most. But that’s what happens sometimes when a movie spends four years in post-production being repeatedly reworked–over time, everything gets sanded down into nothingness.
It’s frustrating to see from a filmmaker like Eli Roth, who often gets to act as an auteur with his horror films, like last year’s Thanksgiving. But just as often in recent years, he’s making stuff like this. And The House With a Clock in Its Walls. And his remake of Death Wish. In short, anonymous studio jobber work that isn’t very good and has no real authorship. Borderlands, likewise, is generic, mid-budget CGI slop that looks like a rather cheap episode of The Mandalorian much of the time. And after years of re-editing and a round of reshoots by a different filmmaker, there’s not much filmmaking craft left on display.
And the cast, unfortunately, isn’t able to help much. Blanchett is putting in some effort, but her American accent is not great–her occasional narration can be especially obnoxious to listen to because of that. But she’s not alone in that, since none of the adult stars make much of an impression in Borderlands. The real star here is Greenblatt as Tiny Tina. Tina fades into the background as the movie goes on, sadly, but when she is the focus, Greenblatt is good enough in the part that she’s one of the few aspects of Borderlands worth remembering.
But hey, at least there is something worth remembering. For most of its length, Borderlands is just unremarkable, the sort of thing that fades from the mind so quickly that it’s actually difficult to dislike it with any real intensity. Aside from Jack Black’s upsetting new version of Claptrap, anyway.
