Film Review: Borderlands

Borderlands
Director: Eli Roth
Arad Productions, Picturestart and Gearbox Studios
In Theaters: 08.09

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with accomplished, award-winning actors appearing in silly popcorn movies, and when someone of Cate Blanchett’s caliber does a gourmet popcorn movie, it can be something truly special. Unfortunately, the video game-inspired space opera Borderlands is hardly gourmet. It’s more like a stale, sticky, slimy, stuck-to-the-bottom-of-your-shoe popcorn movie.

Blanchett (Blue Jasmine, Tár) stars as Lilith, an enigmatic deep space bounty hunter  hired by a powerful corporate magnate, Atlas (Édgar Ramírez, Zero Dark Thirty, Jungle Cruise) to return to her home planet, Pandora (not the one with tall skinny Smurfs, a different planet called Pandora) to rescue his daughter, Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt, 65, Barbie), who has apparently been abducted by Roland (Kevin Hart, Ride Along, Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle), a mercenary gone rogue, and his partner, Krieg (Florian Munteanu, Creed II). As Lilith arrives, she discovers that things are far different than she expected, and when she uncovers the truth, that Tina is an Eridian—a member of an ancient race capable of unlocking Pandora’s secret vaults—it becomes more than clear that Atlas hasn’t been telling her everything. Together with Claptrap (Jack Black, School of Rock, Kung Fu Panda), a wisecracking robot programmed to assist her, and Dr. Patricia Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis, Everything Everywhere All At Once), a  scientist from her past, Lilith must lead this ragtag group of scrappy would-be heroes through Pandora’s treacherous underground maze, fend off Atlas’s private army, the Crimson Lance, and do battle with everyone from alien species to dangerous bandits to prevent Pandora’s most precious secrets from falling into the wrong hands.

Borderlands never had the potential to be a great film by any means, but it could have been a diverting piece of entertainment in the right hands. Director Eli Roth (Hostel, Thanksgiving) was at best a questionable choice for the job. His background in ultra-violent exploitation movies makes him far from a perfect match for a PG-13 space adventure. Rather than going for rousing fun, his mantra seems to be to keep things frenetic, brash and noisy. The plotting is messy, and the screenplay—which has been passed from writer to writer since the project first materialized in 2011—is barely coherent. The dialogue is strictly cut and paste: when Lillith says “I’m getting too old for this shit,” it doesn’t even play as a cheeky reference. Roth’s idea of appealing to a younger audience is to keep things as juvenile as possible, with poop and pee jokes around every corner. The action sequences are less built around action than around killing—which seems to be the norm these days, though Roth has no idea how to make these moments stand out without piling on buckets of blood. In terms of science fiction, the closest thing to a fresh idea that Borderlands has to offer is holographic masks, and it goes through a great deal of trouble to set up their existence in order to lead to absolutely nothing, raising the question of why they were included in the first place.

Blanchett is one of the most gifted and celebrated actors of our time, yet she’s surprisingly dull as Lillith, faring best in her voice over narrations that bookend the film, and it’s simply a bad casting choice. Hart is giving his all to play against type, yet his screen time is so limited and his character so ill-defined that it’s hard enough to remember that he’s in the movie even when he’s on screen, let alone when he disappears for long periods of time. Greenblatt provides easily the most likable presence, though this has far more to do with the young actor’s considerable charm than anything to do with the character, which plays like they’ve kidnapped Louise from Bob’s Burgers—complete with the rabbit ears—and are forcing her to be in this movie. The most upsetting part of all of this for me, and what is by far the worst element of the film is Claptrap, with Black doing a shrill, high pitched voice and spouting idiotic one liners at a rapid  fire pace, leading up to the big payoff of a robot saying “Well, shit.” As a big fan of Black’s work, I found his performance in Borderlands to be a far more upsetting low point in his career than anything that has gone on with Tenacious D this summer. 

The good news is that Borderlands is only 100 minutes long—the trailers beforehand equal close a quarter of the runtime of the movie—and when it’s over, you never have to think about it again (honestly, I rarely thought about it while I was watching it). While I may have been more venomous toward Trap last week, that was a glorious achievement in bad filmmaking that was meant to be savored. Borderlands isn’t filmmaking, it’s content, in the worst possible sense of the word, and could not more emphatically implore you not to waste your time and money on it. —Patrick Gibbs

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