Borderlands is a disaster. And while it might not singlehandedly undo the goodwill built up around recent video game adaptations – specifically television’s The Last of Us and Fallout – it’s dragged us back to a time when studios used to make these with all the grace and acuity of a drunk person attempting to place a 3am chicken nugget order.
The first mistake here may have been to even try and adapt Borderlands. Granted, it’s one of the best-selling franchises of all time, and its snarky take on the intergalactic, dystopian western is distinctive and well-known in its own right. But it’s also not a series you’ll regularly hear praised for its storytelling – take the controller out of the audience’s hands and put Hostel’s Eli Roth in the director’s chair, and all you can then do is simply bear witness to a series of profoundly unlikeable characters on a journey to achieve something we’ve been given no reason to care about.
It’s a worst-of-all-worlds situation. Lore is delivered with strait-laced, Zack Snyderesque solemnity, as we’re introduced to the far-future planet of Pandora, an untamed territory where corporations and fortune seekers search out the contents of a hidden vault built by an ancient race known as Eridians. It can only be unlocked by a daughter of Eridia destined to do so. Oh, yes, there’s a prophecy in this one.
When Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), daughter of CEO Atlas (Edgar Ramírez), is kidnapped by former mercenary Roland (Kevin Hart), a bounty hunter named Lilith (Cate Blanchett) is hired to retrieve her from Pandora. In time, a ragtag crew is assembled, complete with the muscle (Florian Munteanu’s Krieg), the brains (Jamie Lee Curtis’s scientist Tannis), and the irritating robot (the Jack Black-voiced Claptrap).
What’s important to know is that these people are quirky – a little like James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy you might say, except, in crucial ways, very much the opposite. Gunn’s team all think they’re cool, but are repeatedly and brutally reminded otherwise, which grants them an underdog likeability.
In Borderlands, all the heroes do is inform each other (and the audience) that they are “insane” and “deranged”. There’s a scene where they all accidentally consume urine, another extended bit where the robot defecates bullets, while the insults don’t ever venture beyond the range of “poopy-mouthed ass faces”. No one in the film, or the film itself, ever acknowledges how deeply uncool all of this is.
It’s a race to the bottom for its actors, each of them wildly miscast, even if Blanchett can somewhat skate by on the pure, salvatory force of her sexual charisma. The film’s sacrilegious treatment of place and character will likely send its fans into a white-hot rage, while it remains simultaneously impenetrable and incomprehensible to the casual viewer. And it all plays out against a background that may as well be a blank green screen. It’s depressingly bare, as if someone put a Mad Max filter on a paintball centre. So, fair warning – if you’re a fan of any of the video games currently in the pipeline for adaptation, Borderlands may strike terror into your heart.
Dir: Eli Roth. Starring: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Edgar Ramírez, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu, Gina Gershon, Jamie Lee Curtis. 12A, 101 mins.
‘Borderlands’ is in cinemas from 9 August