At the end of 2022's Tár, Cate Blanchett's titular character, first name Lydia, finds herself at the nadir of her career, shamed and shunned due to her abusive past. She's lost everything in her life, her marriage and career both imploding at once. The movie ends with the conductor preparing for what seems like a comeback performance, a redemption arc wherein the tortured genius gets one more shot, before ending on a very funny and very cruel joke: The performance is of the video game soundtrack for Monster Hunter, and this conductor, who once ruled an orchestra with an iron fist in front of the wealthiest people on Earth, is now relegated to earning a buck in front of cosplayers.
I thought about the ending of Tár a lot while watching Borderlands. Cate Blanchett isn't in the valley of her career, but it sure felt like it. Why else would a multi-time Oscar-winning actress sign up for something as vile as this movie if not for lack of better options?
For those unaware, Borderlands is an adaptation of the video game series of the same name, a "looter shooter" (meaning the thrill is in getting new loot, guns specifically, that can radically change the gameplay; one gun might fire rockets from a pistol, while another might track enemies so aiming is less important) whose main calling card was its edgy humor. By "edgy," I mean "stuck in the late 2000s Reddit epic bacon mindset, sir!" I have to admit that I enjoyed playing the three mainline Borderlands games, mostly for their good co-op play and definitely not for how funny they were.
Because, really, they weren't. Even in 2009, when the first game came out, the humor already felt dated, a variety of nonsensical blabber and obvious stereotypes, some significantly more offensive than others. What, then, does a Borderlands movie turn out to be in 2024, when that humor is almost old enough to drive? The answer, in the incompetent hands of director Eli Roth, is somehow worse than the games that inspired it.
Movie critics and general film-enjoyers get a lot of mileage out of (mostly rightly) dumping on Marvel movies for their eschewing of actual jokes in favor of "Well, that just happened!" quips. Now that I have seen Borderlands, that feels like an indefensible insult to superhero movies. There are no laughs to be found in this particular wasteland, and no joy whatsoever even in the most obvious of banter, with the characters all resorting to pointing out what just happened in a monotone voice meant to portray that everyone is too old for this shit. (Blanchett's character, Lilith, actually says "I'm getting too old for this shit" in an early scene.)
The plot doesn't fare much better than the dialogue. Borrowing and remixing the main story beats from, as far as I could remember, the first two games in the series, Borderlands has a ragtag found-family of sorts attempt to find various keys to a vault, which is said to house alien artifacts that will make whoever opens it the strongest being in the universe. Or something. I'm not really sure, because the movie never explains what those artifacts could actually do, even when they are revealed in the climax. Really, this is just a quest movie, and that can be OK even with undefined stakes, but there's no urgency here. There's an evil corporation trying to access the vault, and some family drama to attempt to inject pathos into something that has no need for it, but every character in the movie is going through the motions, just like the actors portraying them.
Borderlands wastes Blanchett by giving her absolutely nothing to work with. She does her best, I guess, but even her best can't elevate Lilith above the Lone Outlaw stock character type, and she's constantly smirking at nothing in particular. Almost no one else from the cast comes out looking remotely respectable. Jamie Lee Curtis, as an insane scientist whose insanity basically amounts to "she's a bit quirky," further squanders whatever goodwill her misbegotten Oscar might have won her. Venezuelan actor Édgar Ramírez plays the bad guy, Atlas, mostly in hologram scenes, and if someone told me that he filmed everything in one afternoon, I'd believe it. Ariana Greenblatt takes her Barbie character and makes it about 70 percent more inscrutable and irritating, while at least thankfully doing away with (most of) the racist voice-work her Borderlands character, Tiny Tina, was known for in the games. Jack Black voices Claptrap, a robot whose humor is solely rooted in how cute and WALL-E-esque he appears in contrast to the PG-13 profanity he deploys. Only Creed II villain Florian Munteanu escapes with his dignity intact: His Krieg at least utilizes the actor's physicality, and though he plays a trope—the gentle giant—he at least gets to show off an impressive understanding of how stupid this movie is.
And, my god, Kevin Hart. I might have a lot of criticisms of Hart as an actor, but one thing I never thought I would say about him is that he completely phoned in a performance. The man is known, for better and often worse, for giving even the shittiest material his all, but his Roland is played as a straight man, and it's clear from essentially the first scene of the movie that his heart is not in it. By my count, he gets one attempted laugh line, and it's a clunker: After fighting a horde of lunatic gang members and ending up below a pile of corpses, he digs his way out and says "Worst. Orgy. Ever." That's the type of humor we're working with here. If it had a laugh track, it might have been more interesting for the surreality.
Please don't get me wrong: If somehow the above makes it seem like Borderlands could be fun in a trainwreck sort of way, I would be doing everyone a disservice by not saying this explicitly: It. Is. Not. It is a drab cash grab in which there is no cash to grab. I know there's an audience for almost everything, but I can't imagine what the audience is for an ugly, CGI-loaded slog like this. Fans of the video games might get a minor kick out of seeing their favorites on the big screen, but there's nothing beyond a couple of gun name references to act as fan service. Fans of action movies will have exactly one somewhat entertaining scene to watch, a frenetic if hard-to-follow underground scrap set to Motörhead's "Ace of Spades." The rest of the action is either stilted or boring, with the big climactic scene devolving into watching Ramírez cock his arm repeatedly to trigger a laser beam from a spaceship.
Back to the PG-13 rating for a second: If there might have been a saving grace for this movie, it would have come from giving Roth free reign. Roth is no one's idea of a good director, but he at least generally has seemed to understand that his value proposition rests on unrestrained gore. (I saw Hostel and Hostel II, I know what I'm talking about.) Yet there's none of that here, as Borderlands operates within a rating no doubt aimed at attracting kids whose senses of humor haven't matured beyond poop jokes. I don't recall seeing any blood, there are no sick and twisted kills, there's nothing to even grimace at—because there's nothing here.
Instead, Roth is forced to operate like a normal director with normal talents, which he does not possess. The action scenes are shot in a way that hints at a strategy: Make everything look as stylish as possible, and hope no one notices how repetitive that action is. The story and dialog scenes are worse, with close-ups under fake lighting giving everything a soundstage vibe, one which made me believe at times that these actors had never been in the same room with one another. I'm tempted to credit Roth with at least avoiding a first-person POV scene like Doom's, but at least that might have been interesting.
Borderlands is a top-to-bottom failure, because every choice made in its creation is hostile to the very idea of intrigue. Knock the games all you want, but at least the act of playing them was fun, in its own way. The movie can't replicate the only good parts of the games, though, and so what it's left with is a sleepwalk through motions that aren't good to begin with. I'm not here to say that there is a better Borderlands movie to be made; this was a doomed endeavor from the start because what Borderlands did best as a video game—game play—is irrelevant to cinematic adaptation.
The only way this disaster could have been avoided is by someone, somewhere, realizing what a piece of shit the original property was, and how little juice could be squeezed from the idea of Mad Max aesthetics married to a teenager's sensibilities. The result, it turns out, is somehow worse than the topline description suggests. Borderlands is noteworthy only in how embodies everyone's worst impulses smashed together in an assault on anyone unlucky or unwise enough to sit through it.
