Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Borderlands’ on Starz, a Video Game Adaptation Starring Cate Blanchett and Kevin Hart

By John Serba

This week on Wow That $120 Million Coulda Been Better Spent Theatre is Borderlands (now streaming on Starz), a long-in-the-works, long-on-the-shelf adaptation of the hit video game franchise. The project has been kicking around for nearly a decade, its lengthy pre-production development and post-production studio tinkering delaying its premiere until a beat or three after the game’s popularity peaked – and the result was a deadly $33 million box office take coupled with plenty of stop-stop-it’s-already-dead! reviews. The unlucky participants here are director/candidate for weirdest career ever Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, The House With a Clock in its Walls, The Green Inferno, the Death Wish remake), why-is-SHE-in-this-thing lead Cate Blanchett and supporting players Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Hart, who all come together to make something borderline unwatchable. 

BORDERLANDS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: LET IT BE SAID that any movie that buries us in voiceover exposition during the first two minutes must be destroyed. That’s common knowledge. And yet here’s Borderlands, doing exactly that. Rather audacious of it to deploy such lethal audience-alienating tactics so quickly, eh? And so we hear Blanchett, as badass bounty hunter Lilith, going on about the crappy planet Pandora, where an ancient vault containing untold power (or wealth or treasure or something, but whatever it is will surely be rendered with hideous CGI) is hidden, and only the stupidest craziest people ever would ever try to find it, etc. etc. Then the narration gets extra audacious when Blanchett reads, “That sounds like some wacko BS, right? I thought so too, until this mess happened,” which sure seems like a meta-warning for the movie we’re about to endure, assuming you have the fortitude to gut it out, and/or place absolutely zero value on your time.

The plot: A mercenary named Roland (Hart) and a hunka muscle named Krieg (Florian Munteanau) kidnap a girl named Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) and take her to Pandora. Why? This will soon be revealed, and you will not be invested in the development whatsoever, promise. Tina’s father is a corporate dickhead named Atlas (Edgar Ramirez), who wants her back, and therefore strongarms Lilith into taking the search-and-rescue gig. She ain’t thrilled, but ya gotta do what ya gotta do, a phrase that sums up her entire personality, unfortunately. See, the things that she gotta do is find people and use big ridiculous guns to kill anyone who might not want her to find said people. She also needs to maintain a Nike-swoosh of a bright-red hairdo that must take many hours and countless sculpting products to style, thus making us wonder when she ever has the time to find and/or kill people. She also rolls her eyes a lot, which I translated as Blanchett’s commentary on the screenplay.

Lilith hates Pandora. Total shithole planet. It’s mostly desert and landfill, with a few wretched hives of scum and villainy hither and thither. She’s the rare visitor to Pandora who isn’t there to hunt for the vault, and she takes offense at the presumption that she’s after such mythical drivel. How does she take offense? By rolling her eyes, DUH. Lilith happens across an annoying little robot named Claptrap (voiced by Jack Black in Way Too Hyper Mode), who helps her find Tiny Tina. Easy gig! But Lilith soon learns that Tiny Tina don’t wanna go back to her shitty shitty dad, so Lilith ends up allying with Roland and Krieg to protect the kid, I think because she’s the key to finding the vault. Atlas isn’t happy about that, so he sics his army of Mad Max reject extras on them. Our core people then seek out the help of a science lady named Tannis (Curtis), the movie needing another half-empty character to fill out the ragtag group of misfits, because Hollywood law stipulates that any ragtag group of misfits must, at minimum, number six annoying characters with a maximum of 1.75 core personality traits each. The rest of the movie consists of incoherent violence, flaccid wisecracks and meaningless plot developments. Enjoy!

Photo: Lionsgate

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Borderlands makes Tank Girl look like Fury Road. Also, Guardians of the Galaxy should cite copycat law when filing suit against it. Yes, copycat law. Playground rules! Look it up!

Performance Worth Watching: (Skims Wikipedia) Yep, this is Blanchett’s most embarrassing role, even taking Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull into consideration. Hope it paid well.

Memorable Dialogue: Blanchett’s lines feature multiple instances of the movie reviewing itself, e.g., “Is there any way out of here that doesn’t involve garbage?” and “Could you turn this shit off?”

Sex and Skin: None.

Photo: ©Lions Gate/Courtesy Everett Collection

Our Take: So. Is it as bad as they say? I dunno. It’s definitely more generic than godawful, which isn’t exactly an endorsement – the opposite, to be honest, because “godawful” might translate to “unintentionally funny” and/or “entertaining while drunk or high.” Borderlands is a classic example of the movie-as-white-noise aesthetic, suffocating under its own maximalism, its every nook and cranny stuffed with audio-visual noise, which leads to at-best shrugworthy character revelations, and all blurs together into a 100-minute pile of who cares. 

I can’t speak for diehard gamers, who may get more out of the experience, cracking easter eggs and seeing their favorite characters come alive via real actors spewing deadass wiseass just-plain-ass dialogue, running around aimlessly in front of green screens. It’s rough sledding for the rest of us, though. Weirdly, everyone in this movie is mouthy save for a phonin’-it-in Kevin Hart, and Blanchett and the rest maybe work too hard to be “edgy” and “cynical”; they sneer and collect paychecks while we try to maintain consciousness, actively being drained of our enthusiasm for the art of cinema. 

The action is cluttered and forgettable, and Roth and Joe Crombie’s screenplay banks on juvenilia for laughs, leaning on the classic triple-p comedy stratagem: poop, puke and pee, including, but not limited to, a robot with dysentery blasting nuts and bolts from its rectal region. Borderlands sure tries to be funny, but fails mightily – unless you take into account its oodles of unintended meta-commentary. That is hilarious. 

Our Call: Borderlands is maddeningly forgettable. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.