'Borderlands' review: A return to the dark ages of video game adaptations

Most of the Borderlands games' renown comes from their tight gunplay, showers of loot, and colorful world-building. There isn't much of a compelling narrative tying everything together, especially if you look at the highly criticized third mainline entry. A successful big-screen adaptation would have to double down on a 'style over substance' approach and nail the absurdist fun and humor. Sadly, Lionsgate and Eli Roth's take on the material utterly fails to hit the target.

The Borderlands movie – which has been in development for longer than anyone can remember – kicks things off with a solid expository intro: Cate Blanchett's Lilith tells us the basics about humanity's place among the stars in this faraway corporate future, the Eridians, their ancient tech, and why Pandora could be the most important planet in the known universe. It does its job of quickly getting audiences into the mood for a fun sci-fi adventure and effectively delivers the basic information to jump straight into the action. The wonder almost immediately dissipates though.

By and large, and from a Borderlands fan's point of view, it's hard to deny a lot of love actually went into the production design, props, and costumes. At first glance, the movie does look like Borderlands. However, neither Eli Roth's direction nor Rogier Stoffers' cinematography figure out how to make the entire thing come to life or feel large. Quite often, action sequences that probably 'looked' good enough on paper are oddly constrained and awkward on the screen. That's strike one, as the main appeal behind Borderlands is creative action and thrilling gunfights in an outlandish setting. Plus, it doesn't help that the games' signature violence and potty-mouthed comedy are nowhere to be found, as the movie sports a pretty tame PG-13 rating.

If Tim Miller's (Deadpool) reshoots were truly extensive, it's hard to discern how they have altered the end product, as the whole thing consistently looks flat and lifeless. In fact, the most convincing bits (of which there are only a few) from a visual standpoint don't involve action at all. Complex sequences that take place in exterior spaces might be considered the worst offenders, with poor chroma-keying all over and actors standing around and executing restricted stunts in what often seem the smallest physical sets for a 'major' blockbuster in recent memory. On the other hand, regular gray corridors and garbage dumps are abound, so Borderlands often feels like an expensive season finale to a 2000s sci-fi show instead of a $120-million big-screen project.

On its own, the fact the creative team struggled so much to come up with and execute exciting action scenes in front of the cameras already spell trouble for the entire flick, but things gradually get worse as the script, written by Roth himself and Joe Crombie, fails to give anyone beyond Blanchett anything meaningful to do. 

There's an attempt to give Ariana Greenblatt's Tiny Tina something meaty which directly ties into Blanchett's arc (and not in the way you'd imagine), but instead, we repeatedly get half-baked jokes and tired banter that feels like we fell into an alternate universe in which James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy movies were terrible. At some point, The Last of Us scribe Craig Mazin worked on a script for Borderlands, and we can only guess most of his work was scrapped. Luckily for him, he's not part of the final credits.

Jack Black clearly had a blast voicing the iconic robot Claptrap (who's delightfully modeled and animated), and both Blanchett and Jamie Lee Curtis seemed to be fully aware of how bad the final movie could be, going for visibly bored, hammy takes on their respective characters. Meanwhile, Greenblatt and Florian Munteanu (Tiny Tina's psycho protector, Krieg) can only deliver one-note performances that seem based on a small note about their characters written on a napkin. As for Kevin Hart, casting him as the originally stoic mercenary Roland might go down as one of the biggest miscasts in movie history, yet for that to happen, someone would have to remember this huge misfire for longer than a couple of months.

Certified Hollywood bad guy Edgar Ramírez could have brought some sauce into the mix, but he's also never allowed to 'go for it', remaining stuck in an 'evil, ambitious CEO' role with no defining traits — another major crime when you consider Borderlands 2's Handsome Jack was a fantastic, 'love to hate' type of villain that belonged to the corporate world introduced early on by the movie. Likewise, Janina Gavankar, who many may remember from Star Wars Battlefront II (2017), repeatedly tries to bring some bite to Commander Knoxx, but all efforts are hopeless as the editing never lets anything or anyone breathe.

So, who was Borderlands for anyway? Gearbox honcho Randy Pitchford still seems to believe 'true fans' will love the movie, yet it appears barely anyone showed up to check it out and the (traditionally generous) CinemaScore for it sits at a dreadful D+ rating. Critics also hated it, and even if we go back a few months in time, the sentiment on the social platforms where the flick has been marketed and in the trailers' comment sections wasn't much more positive. We ourselves prayed it could be at least watchable, alas...

It's at this point where we must underline Borderlands isn't downright terrible. Hell, it probably isn't even the worst mainstream release hitting theaters this year. But we all know that sometimes it's much worse to leave the cinema feeling nothing at all versus a healthy level of anger. It's not even frustrating to watch unfold. It's just a sad affair, like a train that slowly breaks down and comes to a halt instead of going off the rails and flying off a cliff. You might crack a smile when a skag comes on screen or a secondary character looks lifted straight out of the games, but those are just tiny moments lost in a desert of white noise.

All in all, Borderlands fails twice: It's an adaptation that strips down the source material to a forgettable sci-fi romp that lacks any unique identity. More egregiously, it's boring! All its attempts at action or comedy fail to elicit even a couple of cheers or laughs. We're depressingly used to seeing adaptations that are just a couple of corporations in a trench coat wearing the skin of something we love for quick bucks, but we draw the line at incompetent popcorn filmmaking that makes us wish we were scrolling through TikTok videos instead. After Fallout season 1 setting a new golden standard for video game adaptations this year, Borderlands is a painful bummer.

'Borderlands' is available to watch in theaters now... normally this outro sentence is for your information, but this time it's more of a warning... or a threat.