Euronews Culture's Film of the Week: 'Borderlands' - One to avoid at all costs
There’s bad news and then there’s worse news when it comes to Borderlands.
The bad news is that despite TV shows like The Last Of Us and Fallout indicating that the big screen video-game adaptation curse had been broken, Eli Roth’s take on the 2009 sci-fi shooter RPG proves that multi-episode series are the way to go.
The worse news is that Borderlands could very well be one of 2024’s worst films, which considering its cast – Cate Blanchett, Jamie-Lee Curtis, édgar Ramírez, Kevin Hart, Gina Gerson, Jack Black - is quite the catastrophic achievement.
The film sees soldier Roland (Hart) joining forces with juggernaut Krieg (Florian Munteanu) to rescue a young woman named Tiny Tina (Barbie’s Ariana Greenblatt) from a prison cell. The trio then head to the hellish desert planet Pandora, which is filled with treasure hunters searching for an ancient alien vault called The Vault. It turns out that the literal Pandora’s box of a MacGuffin can only be opened by Tina, who is the daughter of villainous CEO Atlas (Ramírez). Atlas has tasked the grizzled bounty hunter Lilith (Blanchett) to track down Tina and bring her back to him. But wouldn’t you know it, Lilith ends up teaming up with the ragtag bunch to find The Vault, which holds the key to thwarting Atlas’ nefarious plans.
It’s essentially a bargain bin riff on James Gunn’s Guardians Of The Galaxy and George Miller’s Mad Max series, with the dispiriting inclusion of a usually excellent Jamie Lee Curtis as xenoarcheologist Tannis and a robot sidekick named Claptrap (Black), who shits bullets and spouts out the sort of jokes that make Jar Jar Binks come off as a misunderstood comic genius.
Suffice to say that Roth and co-writer Joe Crombie possess none of Gunn’s charming irreverence or precise vision when it comes to the source material, and zero of Miller’s talent for staging a pulse-quickening action scene. Roth & Co. just think that if you keep the screen busy (and noisy) enough, try to revive the term “badonkadonk” as the height of comedy and include some retro needle drops (Mot?rhead, The Heavy and Muse stand out in the worst of ways), viewers will be distracted enough to forget that the juvenile jokes are brutally unfunny, and that their whole hoary endeavour is a rip off of countless far superior sci-fi actioners.
Sloppily orchestrated, utterly spiritless and ultimately a masterclass in how to comparatively redeem the flaws of this year’s Furiosa and Deadpool & Wolverine, Borderlands is hot garbage that will bore gamers and newcomers alike, reminding you that some video-games should stay off the big screen.
Only Blanchett manages to escape relatively unscathed, purely because it’s clear that she’s doing her level best with a dull screenplay brimming with hackneyed dialogue (including ye olde Lethal Weapon line “I’m too old for this shit”), and that it’s great to see her as an action-movie lead. Shame she wasn’t given more to play with and that her direction limited itself to: “You have bright red hair and a punky swagger – Aaaaand ACTION!”
“It’s a shithole,” says her character upon arriving on Pandora.
And that, in a nutshell, is Borderlands.
Borderlands is out in cinemas now.
