James Berardinelli review - * out of ****

https://www.reelviews.net/reelviews/borderlands

Let me start with a confession: Although I have experience with a variety of computer/video games, I have never played Borderlands. That makes my perspective of the movie free of any game-related baggage. Perhaps those familiar with Borderlands will find enough in the way of fan service to somehow redeem this unfocused abortion of a motion picture. Perhaps those who have enjoyed the interactive experience will be able to overlook the complete idiocy masquerading as a screenplay. And perhaps those who are avowed Borderlands fans will find something to applaud about this dumpster fire of a game-to-film translation. At a time when streaming series like The Last of Us and Fallout have illustrated how video games can provide the structure for non-interactive narratives, Borderlands recalls the bad old days when video game movies were (justifiably) sloughed off as messy, derivative, and pointless.

It would be easy to blame writer/director Eli Roth, whose resume doesn’t inspire confidence. In this case, however, Roth may not be entirely to blame. He submitted his cut of Borderlands to Lionsgate in early 2022 before moving on to other things. Meanwhile, in a classic case of studio interference, the suit-wearing bean-counters ordered reshoots (which Roth couldn’t supervise because he was already working on another project) and re-edits to tone down the violence from Roth’s hard-R version to something more palatable to a PG-13 audience.

As for why Cate Blanchett accepted the lead role of Lilith the Bounty Hunter, this seems to be a lingering aftereffect of the pandemic. Blanchett, eager to play almost any role that would get her away from home, apparently jumped at the chance. But the movie Blanchett agreed to headline seems to have been considerably different from the one that has reached the screen. It’s hard to say whether Roth’s “vision” was more coherent than the cobbled-together reworking co-credited to “Joe Crombie” (allegedly author Joe Abercrombie, who has written some damn good fantasy novels) and it doesn’t matter. We have what we’re given and it is damn near unwatchable.

The movie’s scattershot pacing and uneven presentation disallow viewer engagement with any of the two-dimensional types functioning as characters. For the most part, the actors are phoning it in and that includes some pretty big names: Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Edgar Ramirez, and Jamie Lee Curtis. All the special effects and action appear to have one purpose: obscure the lack of a meaningful story. I guess if one was to boil this down to a basic genre category, it would be “superhero origin tale,” as if we didn’t have enough of those already.

The story transpires on the distant planet of Pandora (no relationship to the world in Avatar – both are named after the woman whose box caused a great deal of trouble) where the rogue soldier Roland (Kevin Hart) and his compatriot Krieg (Florian Munteanu) have traveled with their charge, Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), who is the “daughter” of one of the most powerful men in the universe, Atlas (Edgar Ramirez). Wanting his daughter back for reasons other than fatherly love, Atlas hires bounty hunter Lilith (Blanchett) to revisit to her home world of Pandora and, aided by the incessantly talky robot sidekick Claptrap (Jack Black), locate Tina and bring her home. After Lilith tracks down the girl, however, she discovers there’s more to the job than meets the eye and she ends up joining Roland and Krieg in their mission to protect Tina from Atlas

This is ultimately Lilith’s story, illustrating her evolution from a crimson-haired mercenary into a superhero called “Firehawk.” The transformation, which occurs suddenly and with minimal build-up, is one of the film’s least impressive instances. Firehawk’s battles are dull and predictable affairs; their progression gives the movie a strongly anticlimactic flavor – it would be a stretch to argue that Borderlands comes close to “building” to anything except the end credits, which don’t arrive soon enough.

Roth has made his “name” in horror; he is not known as an action director, yet Borderlands is chock full of action scenes. They are, for the most part, incomprehensible. It’s difficult to say whether the primary fault lies with how they were choreographed, shot, or edited. Whatever the case, viewing the various special effects-soaked conflicts results in a mixture of boredom and confusion.