Borderlands review: Even Cate Blanchett can't save this disastrous video game adaptation

The Eli Roth-directed film, which brings to life the popular first-person shooter, is a craven, shallow mess that should be avoided at all costs

From left, Cate Blanchett and Ariana Greenblatt in the film Borderlands, based on the hit video game series. Photo: LionsgateCath

Last year, I had a chat with writer Craig Mazin, who wrote a script for Borderlands before removing his name. He was celebrating the release of HBO’s The Last of Us, widely considered one of the best video game adaptations of all time, and I asked him why the show had so little competition in that category.

There’s a good reason for that, he said. They’re mostly just not made with love.

Businesspeople look at stats and sales and engagement metrics, get excited and buy the rights. Then they call up big-name writers and directors with the shiny new toy in their portfolio, and say, “look at this thing we got, do you want to do it?” The writers and directors say yes because they like the fat pay check that comes with it. But do they care? Not really. It’s just work.

Perhaps there was a point at which Mazin cared deeply about Borderlands, and perhaps that’s how they landed Cate Blanchett, one of best actresses in the world, to star in it. But watching the final product – directed and co-written by Eli Roth – it’s easy to see why the writer who replaced him, Joe Crombie, apparently used a pseudonym.

Borderlands, based on the massively popular first-person shooter space western, is bad – very bad. Unfortunately, it’s not even the kind of bad you can have fun with – that would have taken someone putting their heart into it and failing.

It’s the worst of both worlds, really. The bad video game films of the '90s had campy charm – Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, Street Fighter or Super Mario Bros. Meanwhile, Borderlands is a hollow, craven mish-mash of half-baked ideas that is a perfect encapsulation of the age of IP.

This is a time when creativity is a secondary concern, debt-ridden studios are full of executives all doing anything they can to avoid being fired, and so all that matters is name recognition, whether it’s a game, doll or grocery store brand (how much longer before a Green Giant frozen vegetable cinematic universe is in the works?).

But anyway, Borderlands is set on the planet Pandora, with Blanchett playing a mercenary named Lilith who’s been tasked with bringing back the teenaged Tiny Tina (Barbie’s Ariana Greenblatt) to her father Atlas (Edgar Ramirez), Pandora’s most powerful businessman.

This is interrupted when Tiny Tina’s crew, which includes another mercenary named Roland (a tough-as-nails straight man played inexplicably by Kevin Hart) and Krieg (Florian Munteanu), a guy with muscles who wears a mask and mostly grunts. They team up to find some sort of vault which might hold a secret powerful thing of some kind. To quote Tim from The Office, I’m boring myself just talking about it.

Jamie Lee Curtis takes up space in the film for much of the runtime, which will mostly leave you wondering how she ever won an Oscar as she can’t seem to deliver a single line that rings true.

The film leans heavily on mad-cap violent comedy. Tiny Tina throws bombs at people like firecrackers. Jack Black voices a robot named Claptrap who is there to provide humorous asides and commentary, but will likely never elicit a smile from viewers.

Roth, the man who will likely be remembered as the guy who played the cool role that was written for Adam Sandler in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, brings no noticeable flair to the proceedings. It’s hard to know whether he was unwilling or unable to inject some basic human feeling here at any point.

I yearned for Blanchett to at least seem like she was having fun with this mess, but her exaggerated brightly coloured wig is the campiest thing here. She’s trudging through it, as are the rest of them, and if this was the first time I’d seen her in a film, I doubt I’d remember her face when looking back at it.

Run for the hills from Borderlands, there’s no joy to be had here.