Cate Blanchett has played queens, prime ministers, psychiatrists, artists, hipsters, thieves, Southern belles, evil stepmothers, Norse deities, Nazis, Katherine Hepburn, Bob Dylan and an elf. She’s an actor who’s fearless in her choices and boundless in her versatility. So you can imagine her being approached to play a bounty hunter on a junkyard planet far, far away, shooting down scavengers and psychopaths like an interstellar gunfighter, and thinking: Aha! I haven’t checked that off my to-do list yet! Sign me up.
We can only speculate that a constant craving for variety, along with what we hope was a brink’s truck filled with cash, compelled the Oscar-winning star to jump on board Borderlands, the adaptation of the landmark first-person shooter video game series. The chance to channel her inner Clint Eastwood probably played a part as well. Maybe she simply wanted to do the action-hero thing in a VFX-filled potential franchise-starter. What we want is a time machine, which would allow us to travel back to the moment Ms. Blanchett first picked up the “script” for this unholy disaster and plead: Don’t do it. Please, for the love of all that is sacred and joyful, Step. Away. From. This. Biohazard.
Naturally, in the spirit of generosity, we’d additionally try to warn as many of her cast mates-slash-fellow hostages — Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis, Arianna Greenblatt, Jack Black, Edgar Ramírez — as we could. But the Tár star would be our first stop. As Lilith, the red-haired recovery agent with the fastest blasters west of the Andromeda, she gets to strike a lot of super-cool poses and engage in her share of pew-pew-pew gunplay. She also seems the most lost in this cluttered, confusing catastrophe of an attempt to translate the adrenaline rush of a billion-selling shooter series into a fan-servicing movie. And trust us when we say that, despite the iconography of the in-game planet Pandora and many of its well-known inhabitants (Roland, Tiny Tina, Tannis) being present and accounted for, that fans will not be serviced here. It’s not a movie for critics, as the saying goes. Nor is it suitable for consumption by most gamers, film lovers or 99-percent of carbon-based life forms. You seriously wonder if the sole purpose of Borderands is to make every other video game adaptation look a thousand times better in comparison.
As in the game, there’s an alien race known as the Eridians, and a vault located on Pandora filled with powerful tech they left behind when they vacated this cosmic-frontier wasteland now filled with “corporations, criminals and treasure hunters.” Three keys are needed to open it. A number of folks think Tiny Tina (Greenblatt), a teen with a love of bunny ears and exploding stuffed bunny dolls, is the third key. A soldier of fortune named Roland (Hart) liberates her from a space prison so she can help him locate the loot. Tina’s industrial-titan father, Atlas (Ramírez), hires Lilith to retrieve her.
She finds Tina, Roland and their hulking partner Krieg (Florian Munteanu), and eventually joins them on their quest to find the vault, fighting off masked marauders and assorted bad guys. The eccentric scientist Tannis (Curtis) becomes part of the crew as well. So does a small droid known as Claptrap. In the games, the robot is usually a tour guide and occasional exposition dumper; in one of the later games, he becomes an active, mission-playing character. Here, he’s voiced by Jack Black as a sort of manic, nonstop wisecrack machine that wears out his welcome 000.4 seconds after he utters his first line. A colleague described this performance as “Lotsa jokes, no laughs,” which could double as a tagline for the movie as a whole. We love you, Jack, but listening to you spit out snarky faux-zingers like an annoying sitcom kid is technically against the rules of the Geneva Convention.
The idea here is to take these branded building blocks and craft a sci-fi quasi-Western fantasy-quest action buddy comedy out of them, with a lot of famous faces dotting the green-screened backgrounds. The result is something that meets none of the requirements of any of those genres in terms of thrills, chills, chuckles, dramatic momentum, basic storytelling or coherence. Whether you love or loathe director Eli Roth, a guy who’s somehow managed to turn gushing horror-fanaticism into a filmmaking career, you won’t find an ounce of his personality or particular sensibility in any scene; how much of that is due to this being a for-hire gig or the fact that Deadpool‘s Tim Miller shot a bunch of reshoots after Roth had to leave the project is anyone’s guess. There are those who theorize Roth’s cowriter, Joe Crombie, is actually a pseudonym, which suggests there was at least one reasonable person involved with this.
The bar for video game movies has been staggeringly low, and why these screen-to-screen adaptations are so hard to crack is a subject for another day. Borderlands doesn’t just suffer from the usual slings of arrows of moving something stupendously successful in one medium to another, and praying that most of the beloved, vital elements don’t get lost in translation. It is, in no uncertain terms, a horrendous waste of time, talent and pixels. Not even the pleasure of seeing Blanchett twirling pistols and kicking ass can salvage this. Go play the Borderlands shooters. Go watch six-hour gameplay videos of it on YouTube. Go get several chlamydia tests back to back. Every one of those options are far more useful and far, far less painful than this.