Game – Movie Review: Borderlands (2024)

We were due one, weren’t we? After a run of well-made successful video game film adaptions (The Super Mario Bros. Movie) along came Borderlands to remind us that when these films bomb, they bomb really hard.

Borderlands is a bad film, but the reasons as to why are a bit complicated, and it all stems from the stupid attempt to appeal to a mainstream audience with a game franchise that doesn’t have mainstream appeal. Dumbing down all aspects the games, putting together the laziest of stories, and making a mess of the editing, Borderlands is a head-scratcher of a film. Who is it supposed to appeal to and who is to blame for it turning out so bad?

It’s easy to sneer at Gearbox and 2K (and rightfully so) as their behaviour in the video game industry makes it likely that they didn’t give a damn about how their licence was treated. However, director and co-writer (alongside Joe Crombie) Eli Roth must shoulder a lot of the blame too. But then you have Tim Miller, who did a few weeks of reshoots, and you have to wonder who pushed for the film to have a PG-13 / 12A rating? This is Borderlands, what are we even doing?

Producers? Editors? Actors? Costume Designers? Caterers? It sure feels like everyone involved deserves to be blamed in some way or another for this mess, because that is what Borderlands is.

It’s a mess, but worse than that, it’s boring.

Based on the Gearbox Software (boo) video game series, Borderlands stars Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Edgar Ramirez, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu, Gina Gershon, and Jamie Lee Curtis.

What a list of names! How can a film with that many talented actors, action stars, and comedians fail? It’s really easy when they’re given nothing to work with, given nothing to make their characters substantial, and given nothing to care about, aside from a tidy pay check. It is disappointing to see actors of this calibre phone it in (Blanchett looks bored most of the time), but they can’t fix a crappy script, and Borderlands has one crappy story.

Which is funny, because the first Borderlands game had a crappy story too, and it’s why most gamers think of the sequels, in particular the second game, when talking about Borderlands’ story. So, it’s quite a surprise to see the overarching plot of this film come from the first game.

It’s all about pandemonium on the planet Pandora, and the mysterious vault, vault hunters, greedy corporations, and guns. Lots of guns. Except the film drops most of this in favour of a story about Tiny Tina, her being a key to the vault, so being hunted by Atlas. Which is where the likes of Lillith and Roland come in. Except the former is dealing with familial issues, while being the ultimate badass, and the latter is short and weirdly serious (which is in keeping with the game’s character, I suppose). That’s about the level of this film’s humour.

Oh, don’t make the mistake of seeing Claptrap and thinking that’s where the comedy comes from. Oh no. For that to work, this film needed to be brave, and the sight of a Jack Black voiced CGI Claptrap insulting a group of Psychos with insults like ‘poopyhead’ is embarrassing. It, alongside the ‘Claptrap pooping’ scene, are just some of the film’s crashing attempts at being funny.

If all of this wasn’t bad enough, and I’m glossing over so much here, the film looks terrible too. The total lack of imagination here, the dour colour schemes, and that everything is CGI, just makes it so unwatchable too. Pandora has never looked more dull, and this is coming from someone who thought the first Borderlands’ game was just alright.

Who is this film for? By the end, its main vault plot point has become pointlessly convoluted, characters are jumping in and out at random (and in one case, changing alignment on a whim), there’s a character twist that everyone will see coming a mile away, and the ending is meh, it all just feels like a waste of time.

It’s an impossible film to enjoy, there’s simply too much wrong with. Every time you do find something that likable, it’s completely cancelled out by several things that are terrible. All this for around a hundred minutes.

It bombed at the box office, but of course it did, you can’t spend that much money on a video game adaption that has very little chance of capturing the attention of the mainstream, regardless of how many big actors you jam into it. You can’t isolate the one fanbase you should be able to rely on, the gamers, by showing how little love you have for the video game it is based on. You simply can’t spend that much money on such an unfocused script and expect it to be successful.

It’s Borderlands for goodness’ sake; this should have been easy. Guns, big explosions, tons of blood and guts, absurd characters, and writers who know dark comedy. It may not have been successful either, but at least it would have been memorable. In the end, this will go down as just another bad video game film adaption and be forgotten about completely in time.