REVIEW: ‘Borderlands’ Makes You Loathe the Video Game That Spawned It

Eli Roth’s Borderlands is a throwback in all the worst ways. On the heels of projects like The Last of Us and Fallout, the hit-or-mostly-miss director catapults us back to the mid-to-late 2000s, an era where video game adaptations like Doom and Alone in The Dark sorely misunderstood what made their source materials so rich and deserving of Hollywood treatment. Yet, Roths’s approach to Borderlands takes it a step further than the likes of Uwe Boll, with each of its one hundred excruciating minutes forcing gamers and non-gamers alike to be actively disinterested in the video game it hails from.

With its glowing, synthetic colour palette and cast of oddballs and outlaws, Borderlands desperately wants audiences to believe it has a personality. But none of it rises above a thin coat of paint. One that’s easily scratched off to reveal a cast of characters duller than the weightless explosions and chases they take part in. From urine-spraying monsters to secret superpowers, Roth smears everything across the screen to elicit a response that never comes. In the process, he also crushes any inkling of originality his adaptation might have had.

Borderlands follows Lillith (Cate Blanchett), a bounty hunter who’s tasked with finding teenager Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), the daughter of the universe’s most powerful man, Atlas (Edgar Ramírez). As part of the gig, Lilith is forced to return to her home planet of Pandora, a barren wasteland full of crazies and mercenaries looking for an ancient alien vault. She soon forms an unexpected alliance with Roland (Kevin Hart), a former soldier for Atlas, the obsessed Dr. Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), the monosyllabic Krieg (Florian Munteanu), the wisecracking robot Claptrap (Jack Black), and the explosive Tina herself, whose alien bloodline is key to unlocking the coveted vault.

The screenplay, co-penned by Roth and Joe Crombie, takes a page out of every team-centric adventure film but thoroughly lacks the type of varied and eclectic identities they’re built upon. Roth gives us caricatures in place of characters, overdone archetypes that remain so fixed in time they undergo zero change by the time the credits mercifully roll—unless it’s a forced on them during an undercooked, third-act epiphany.

From a shoehorned chosen one, to a boring hulking brute, to a grating comic presence, Roth runs the gamut of stock characters, giving us a group of heroes that feel just as interesting and developed as the nameless henchmen they gun down.  Borderlands attempts to ape contemporaries like The Guardians of the Galaxy but wholly lacks the human touch to render it the least bit relatable or engaging.

As a result, Roth unintentionally becomes the rare filmmaker to accurately reflect the video game experience on the silver screen, by capturing what it feels like to select the bland, default model on the character creation screen. It’s an effect heightened by the sheer lack of chemistry between its ensemble, who, instead of playing off each other, glibly react to one another’s mannerisms.

It’s why much of Borderlands feels like glorified cosplay, where capable performers like Blanchett and Curtis, merely take position and feign emotion to get a nice group picture. Hart especially feels unattuned to the needs of an action star, labouring to separate himself from the countless icons from which his performance is shoddily carved.

Borderlands also struggles to function as a serviceable action experience. Gunshots lack impact, and explosions pack the devastation of a heavy punch. Many of Roth’s set pieces resolve themselves, often as an inconsequential sacrifice or a head-scratching pivot into superhero territory. Borderlands is full of never set up or even paid-off moments, indicative of an experience that can’t wait to get it over with.

Some sequences do threaten to engage but are quickly undone by comedy that aspires for the lowest-hanging fruit. Borderlands takes all of three minutes to make a joke about Hart’s short stature and doesn’t evolve past overused quips like “Take it easy on the merchandise.”  Borderlands humour is eye-rolling at its best and irritating at its worst, primed to dumbfound audiences with how out-of-touch and dated each gag feels.

Borderlands constantly traps audiences between apathy and agony, either wearing us down with its lifeless, tropey cast of characters or frustrating us with its potential greatness. There exists an alternate version of Borderlands, that puts its promising sci-fi sandbox to use with far more original characters. But it’s unfortunate that the story Roth chooses to tell, results in an all-new low for the video game adaptation. At least Uwe Boll’s films gave us something to snicker at, Borderlands makes us loathe the video game that spawned it.

Borderlands Releases in Theatres on August 9, 2024.