Borderlands
I have spent hundreds of hours in the worlds of Gearbox Software and 2K Games’ “Borderlands,” enraptured by its addictive structure, one that encourages exploration, teamwork, and a constant pursuit of new weapons to unleash on waves of enemies (I’ve written about it here and here, among many other places). While these games are undeniably repetitive – like any titles based on what they call loot farming, which means looking for better and better gear that you can call yoru own – they also exist in a massive world of truly memorable characters like Claptrap, Mad Moxxi, Tiny Tina, and Handsome Jack. The most common setting, the planet of Pandora, is populated by everything from dragon-like creatures to masked enemies who look a lot like the suicidal maniacs in “Mad Max: Fury Road.” And all of this comes with creative design choices and clever plotting that often includes jokes and twists that harken back to an old-fashioned, almost Vaudevillian sense of humor. It’s not unlike Mel Brooks meets George Miller. All of this is to say that my biggest concern after watching Eli Roth’s abysmal “Borderlands” is that it will now tarnish the legacy of a pop culture franchise that deserves better because nothing that works about the games has been adapted intact in this ugly, boring, truly inept piece of filmmaking, a movie that was mostly shot years ago and should have been shelved even longer. Like maybe forever.
Cate Blanchett (who made this before “TAR” and before Roth made “Thanksgiving” to give you some idea how long it’s been gathering dust) stars as Lilith, one of the beloved Vault Hunters from the video game that has made the jump from console to screen. In this version, Lilith is a bounty hunter, approached one night by employees of the all-powerful Atlas (Edgar Ramirez), who has a high-paying job for the tough-talking mercenary. When Lilith is swayed by the amount of money that Atlas is willing to pay for the gig, I laughed thinking (hoping) that Blanchett also got a life-changing amount of cash to star in a project that’s this far below her talent level.
The job is to find Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), the daughter of Atlas, who has been kidnapped by another classic video game character named Roland (Kevin Hart), a soldier who has gone rogue and escaped to Pandora with the girl and a “Psycho” named Krieg (Florian Munteanu). She may be the answer to a legendary vault on Pandora that had created an entire industry of treasure hunters trying to find it.
On returning to her home planet of Pandora, Lilith runs into a robot named Claptrap (voiced by Jack Black), who serves a sort of comic relief, which would imply there’s actual comedy in this film. There is not. Just endless rambling. Fans of the game will notice some other familiar personalities like Moxxi (Gina Gershon) and Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis). According to some published credits, Scooter and Hammerlock also make appearances, but blink and you’ll miss them. I must have blinked.
Lilith, Roland, Tannis, Claptrap, and Krieg should be an obvious variation on Guardians of the Galaxy, outcasts on a distant planet who have to use their different strengths to save the day as a team, but the script by Roth and Joe Crombie is flatly uninterested in giving them memorable traits. Blanchett is such a great actress that she sells a little bit of this defiantly shallow screenplay with a smirk, but Hart looks visibly bored at times, perhaps swallowed up in the reshoots that led to a lot of the delays on the release of this film. On that note, the script for “Borderlands” was once credited to Craig Mazin, the genius behind “Chernobyl” and “The Last of Us,” but he’s taken his name off the film now after the reshoots. When a film goes through that much turmoil, one can usually see where the final product has been Frankenstein-ed back together, but even that game is hard to play here. One can imagine a Mazin version that puts a bit more love and care into the world-building than this version, but so little of that has made it to the final cut.
