Borderlands review: Like good movies? Then avoid this brightly-colored disaster

It was only a matter of time before a film like Borderlands came along. In recent years, Hollywood has become increasingly invested in the business of adapting popular video game properties into new, potentially lucrative films and TV shows. This trend has, somewhat surprisingly, produced a few genuinely fun and exciting adaptations, including HBO’s The Last of Us, Amazon’s Fallout, and even — to an extent — last year’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Those three titles, in particular, have done a lot to raise both critics and viewers’ confidence in the quality of the future projects that may come from Hollywood’s current video game craze, so it’s only fitting that Borderlands threatens to take all of that confidence away again.

The new movie from Thanksgiving director Eli Roth is a clunky, lumbering mass of lifeless filmmaking, ham-fisted writing, and — worst of all — unearned confidence. It is a 104-minute-long, self-satisfied smirk with no teeth, an unimaginative amalgamation of video game and sci-fi movie tropes that mistakes making fun of its many, groan-inducing clichés with actual ingenuity. There is nothing new or fresh to be found in Borderlands, except perhaps the discovery that there really are some movies too disastrously messy for even an actress of Cate Blanchett’s caliber to find her way through.

Despite being set in an alternate, presumably sprawling galaxy, Borderlands takes place largely on the fictional desert planet of Pandora. As Blanchett’s red-haired bounty hunter Lilith explains in the film’s stiff opening narration, Pandora was once ruled by a powerful alien race known as the Eridians, but the only trace of them that now remains on the planet is a prophecy that speaks of a future “daughter of Eridia” who will have the power to unlock an ancient, legendary Eridian vault. It’s believed that said vault could help bring prosperity back to Pandora, which is why it has become a subject of obsession not only for its native occupants but also off-planet vault hunters and megacorporation executives who dream of using its contents to expand their own, already immense reserves of power and wealth.

It is one of these executives, an arrogant tech CEO named Atlas (Edgar Ramírez), who seeks out Blanchett’s Lilith early in Borderlands. After interrupting her latest bounty mission, Atlas offers Lilith a life-changing amount of money in exchange for tracking down his daughter, Tina (Barbie star Ariana Greenblatt), who went missing on Lilith’s home planet, Pandora, weeks ago. It doesn’t take Lilith long to do just that, but her mission is complicated by the presence of Roland (Lift‘s Kevin Hart), a former soldier who kidnapped Tina in the hopes that doing so would slow down Atlas long enough for him and his crew to find and open Pandora’s vault first. A couple of explosive misunderstandings and confrontations later, Lilith finds herself reluctantly tagging along with Roland, Tina, and the other two members of their team: a crazed masked enforcer named Krieg (Florian Munteanu) and Dr. Patricia Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), a vault-obsessed friend of Lilith’s late mother.

The turns that Borderlands takes from there are all predictable and gallingly easy to see coming after only a few minutes of watching the film. That matter isn’t helped by the fact that Borderlands features some of the worst dialogue of any movie released this year. Its screenplay, which was originally written by The Last of Us showrunner Craig Mazin before he understandably had his name removed from it, now counts Roth and Joe Crombie (a rumored pseudonym of Mazin’s choosing) as its co-writers. Even those authorial credits seem incorrect, though, because Borderlands ultimately feels like a sad, taped-together assortment of studio notes, on-set ideas, and post-production “fixes” that doesn’t come close to anything resembling an actually satisfying Hollywood blockbuster.

The film has no sense of forward momentum or pace. It feels less like a legible adventure story and more like a 40-hour video game that has been cut down to a two-hour montage of just its cutscenes and quicktime events. Roth and editors Julian Clarke and Evan Henke speed up and slow down the film at a rate that is downright befuddling — skipping over major sections of character development and world-building while still trying to jam in set pieces and minor narrative detours that end up jutting out like ill-fitting puzzle pieces. At one point shortly after Lilith’s arrival on Pandora, Blanchett’s voice-over returns to explain how she ran into a group of thieves that she had to take care of on the planet before finally getting a move on… all while viewers watch her do exactly that in an action sequence that feels like it was chopped down from its original two-minute length to 10 seconds. Minutes later, Lilith remarks that she’s spent two weeks on Pandora and hasn’t had any luck finding Tina yet, but it feels before that line is delivered like only one day has passed.

The movie’s choppy, frustrating pace prevents Borderlands‘ cast from doing anything of real worth or substance with any of their characters. Greenblatt and Blanchett both seem, at least, interested in exploring the contradictory shades of Lilith and Tina’s standoffish yet secretly warm-hearted personalities, but they’re not given the space to do that by Borderlands‘ hackneyed writing. Blanchett’s turn, consequently, comes across as more of a sustained pose than a complete performance, while Greenblatt is left with little more to do than giggle and skip as she throws explosives at her and her friends’ various enemies. Unfortunately, none of the film’s other performers fare any better, with Hart failing once again despite his best efforts to pass as a convincing action hero. He isn’t aided in that department by Roth. The director’s one defining artistic trait — his signature, gleefully gruesome eye — is missing from Borderlands, which renders it just as stylistically flat as it is narratively dull.

With its desert, postapocalyptic landscape and neon-colored sets, Borderlands wears its sci-fi and fantasy inspirations openly on its sleeve. While the film may borrow major elements from disparate sources like Mad Max: Fury Road, Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, and Deadpool, though, you’d be better off watching any of those movies instead. Borderlands is, quite simply, a travesty of epic proportions, a misfire that goes so profoundly haywire that seemingly every one of its limbs gets blasted off. All that’s left is its face, which remains frozen in the same smug smile in the desperate hope that it can convince you there’s more going on under its surface than there is. But there isn’t anything to be found beneath Borderlands‘ colorful exterior — not an original idea or compelling artistic pursuit in sight, let alone a heartbeat.

Borderlands is now playing in theaters.