Movie review: Borderlands? A borderline disaster

Borderlands isn't just the worst movie of the year - it's one of the worst blockbusters ever made

Lionsgate

How is it possible that Borderlands, a new action blockbuster based on one of the best-selling video games of all time, will continue its legacy as one of cinema’s greatest disappointments?

That reality is the saddest part of watching the new Borderlands movie, now stupefying and nauseating audiences everywhere. What should be a fun, sci-fi summer romp is instead a total misfire from nearly every department.

For those unfamiliar, the Borderlands games feature a set of ragtag outlaws across dystopian planets across space, often searching for treasure and space-like creatures. This film version loosely follows the main plot of the first game, first released back in 2009.

That premise though, of a rescue mission gone wrong on a dangerous, desert planet, is here obliterated in an awful screenplay that feels like a half-hearted rip-off of Mad Max and Guardians of the Galaxy (another big summer hit that, strangely, first premiered almost ten years ago to the day.)

Borderlands’ script is atrocious, filled with unspecific nonsense at best and cruelty and crudeness at worst. The plot is derivative and simple. The technical design is unfinished and grotesque, with no clear theme or purpose. The editing and direction is confusing, and most of the cast looks bored and anxious on screen.

Even worse is the film’s sense of humour, seemingly insulting the PG audience of teenage boys by stuffing every scene with as much unfunny toilet humour as possible. The jokes are consistently crass and gross - sometimes downright revolting - and each is worse than the one before it.

Some of the more tasteful zingers, for example, include quips like, “You’re a bunch of poopy mouth faces who can eat your own butts!”, or, “I didn’t know electrocution caused defecation!”, complete with the matching visuals.

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As if this wasn’t bad enough, somehow the film’s $110 million budget didn’t include enough to finish rendering or animating the film’s special effects, which often have the composure and detail of a half-finished high school project. I haven’t seen effects this sloppy since 2019’s Cats…which famously went on to win Worst Picture that year.

Having an unpolished final product in the modern movie landscape is unacceptable when it’s a large studio project like here at Lionsgate, especially when the competition (like Universal and Warner Bros.) have cutting-edge effects in every major film with ease. An unfinished or rushed movie is just lazy. The effects are so poorly rendered the 15-year-old original Playstation 3 video game looks better than this.

Yet the worst sin is how all of the characters in the cast are endlessly nasty and unlikable, with almost no redeeming character traits. These are bitter, cynical characters with no counterbalance that makes the audience want to root for them.

Not only is this a betrayal of their more gripping, gritty personalities in the source material, but it gives talented actors in the cast nothing meaningful to work with, leaving them to flounder with shallow, clunky dialogue and comedy dripping with corporate synergy.

I almost feel bad for the genuinely talented performers like Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, and Jamie Lee Curtis whose skills as storytellers and comedians are being wasted, especially with designs and relationships that are being misdirected as a clear knock-off to better science fiction movies of the last decade.

Blanchett, for what it’s worth, is still fully committed to the character however unpleasant she is. Her performance, along with a few others (like a great Janina Gavankar as Commander Knox) is truly the sole enjoyable element of this mess.

Video game movies have had a (perhaps unfair) reputation in the last 40 years for having disingenuous Hollywood adaptations often misunderstanding the ones that made the franchises and characters popular in the first place. It’s possible to get the adaptation right - look at the recent success of The Last of Us on television.

But not Borderlands. Director Eli Roth has completely misunderstood what makes summer blockbusters entertaining or why the games were such a big hit in the first place. His tone is so off-putting that the whole film feels boring and hollow.

I’ve been reviewing movies for more than a decade, and I genuinely can’t remember the last time I disliked the experience of watching a movie this much. For anyone going out to the cinema for a good time, that’s a borderline disgrace.