The Borderlands movie shoots into cinemas today, hot on the heels of a veritable stockpile of video-game adaptations flooding TV and film in recent years.
From Nintendo’s billion-dollar animated effort The Super Mario Bros Movie last year to the incoming Sonic the Hedgehog threequel, video-game adaptations are big business and they seem to be getting better.
Amazon Prime Video’s Fallout adaptation became the second-biggest show ever on the platform, while The Last of Us is easily one of HBO’s best shows, and crucially season two is highly anticipated for fans beyond the games.
Sure, extended runtimes certainly make things easier for world-building, character development and even more Easter Eggs, but more isn’t always better, and in fact, Borderlands’ runtime clips in at a lean-ish 100 minutes. A rare treat in modern cinema.
The problem with Borderlands is that although it’s an incredibly faithful adaptation visually, with fun needle drops and a megawatt comedic cast, it just isn’t funny enough, it isn’t zany enough, and it isn’t even particularly violent enough. It’s somehow bland.
Borderlands falls into a middling realm of ‘blah’, where you can slot it next to other releases on our metaphorical video-game-movie-comparison shelf, such as 2018’s Tomb Raider, 2020’s Monster Hunter and 2022’s Uncharted.
The film follows the key beats of the games with vault hunters descending on Pandora, an alien planet, hunting for magical keys to open a mystical vault with untold power and treasures inside. To do this, a rag-tag bunch of misfits are forced to team up to find the daughter of the most powerful man in the universe.
Fans of the games will delight in the perfect rendition of Claptrap, joyously voiced by video-game-movie mainstay Jack Black.
Yet the role feels like a wasted chance for Black to ad-lib and run wild with the dialogue, or shine through some of his impassioned vocal gymnastics, which made Bowser so compelling, and ‘Peaches‘ such a bad mamma jam.
There are also just too many stoic and heroic characters doing the same thing, which is made all the more odd when you have comedic powerhouses such as Kevin Hart (playing soldier Roland) and Jamie Lee Curtis as a jittery Dr Patrica Tannis.
Hart’s 5’5″ stature, which is so often the punchline in his movies, is referenced once before he defaults to a bland heroic archetype. Beyond one moment of levity with Bobby Lee’s Larry in a bar, there’s little chance to let his natural charisma shine, which again, feels like a waste of his talents.
Some levity comes from Ariana Greenblatt as lost, chaotic teen Tiny Tina, who befriends Florian Munteanu’s near-mute psycho maniac Krieg. Surprisingly, Krieg gets some of the best lines as he bizarrely barks sudden responses in the background.
Rounding out the cast is Cate Beckinsale’s Lilith, who looks incredible. Her hair is a gravitational wonder and the costume looks like a fantastical interpretation of the game, even folding in small hints of the cell-shaded style that made the games so visually unique.
Prime Video’s Fallout managed to walk an incredibly fine line of emotional gravitas with surreal horrific humour, that captured Bethesda’s wasteland perfectly. And it feels like Borderlands could easily have leaned into the humour more, perhaps approaching the film similarly to the Dungeons and Dragons reboot or the Guardians of the Galaxy series, with knowingly daft jokes pushing along the silly proceedings.
The film is released as a 12A, despite the games generally being fairly adult, with swearing, violence, drugs and gore. Foul language is limited here, as are any spots of blood despite A LOT of people being shot dead. Which again, feels like a wasted opportunity for acclaimed horror director Eli Roth.
There’s one moment Tiny Tina snaps a psycho’s neck soundlessly at the side of the screen, making it hard not to feel like the film has been trimmed for a lower age rating.
Would more gore, sex and violence make the film better? No, of course not. But it does pose the question of whether there’s more they could have done with it if they’d pushed the things nearer to the knuckle.
Borderlands feels like a film for kids, but even if that’s the case, that doesn’t excuse the lack of humour and compelling characters, and those failings can’t be outgunned by the strong visuals.
There are great moments, but they dip at points, with wobbly CGI and a distinct feeling of budget limitations holding them back from realising the full extent of the intergalactic neon-apocalyptic world.
Being a fan of the Borderlands games didn’t add huge amounts of depth to the experience, it felt more like ticking off seeing those elements on-screen, with cameos from Mad Moxxi (Gina Gershon) and Marcus (Benjamin Byron Davis).
The ideal situation for video adaptations is to delight existing fans while translating the magic for newbies in a movie medium, all to help them understand what makes the games so special. Borderlands feels like it could have been an outrageous bombastic romp. Instead, it’s more of a trudge through a noisy desert with some cosplayers.
Borderlands in is cinemas now.