Borderlands (2024)

Yeah, I know. I knew full well when this project was announced, it wasn’t going to do well. Number one, its a video game movie. Nobody pulls off a successful video game movie. Nobody.

Having heard all of the “anti hype” surrounding the movie, and being a huge fan of the games (despite not playing in quite some time) I figured I’d give it a shot. And you know what?

I didn’t find it nearly as bad as everyone was saying. But that statement has a few asterisks next to it.

Let’s get started.

First off, like I said, its a video game movie. And if you are wholly unfamiliar with the game being “imagined” for the big screen, you’re probably gonna have a bad time. I have to wonder how much of the negativity was due to probably 90% of the movie-going public either never having heard of the game, or just playing casually a few years back and its slipped their mind.

Because on the surface, I didn’t think it was *that* bad. Hell, I like this movie *better* than Alien: Romulus. Yes, I did. I’ll admit it. It came out in the wash as a fair-to-midland scifi action movie, albeit overflowing with cliches and all the stuff that’s already been done. Nothing new gets brought to the table here.

If you are a fan of the game, you will recognize *a lot* of things that just won’t be obvious to most people. Like I said, its been a while, but I’m pretty sure a lot of the one-liners that don’t make any sense are just pulled straight from the game. “Nobody kills me but me” stuck out as one. Okay, yeah, they’re in there, but they just randomly appear out of context.

What hurts this movie the most, is that Borderlands as a game is never going to translate well to this format. It is just too full of grind missions, repeated terrain, endless waves of enemies, looking to get destroyed by whatever over-the-top weapons you happen to be carrying. The entire game is bizarre, over the top, and makes no sense. That’s the entire point. It’s just silly to the point of madness. Silly for the sake of pure silliness. And we love it for that.

This movie, though, doesn’t quite capture that essence. I’m not sure where the fault lies, but lets take “Tina” (Ariana Greenblatt). She’s a spoiled brat little shit of a character who enjoys brutally killing people via explosives. That’s pretty much the depth of the character right there. And that’s by design. When you try to go further, it just doesn’t work.

All the characters are like that, to a point. Roland is, well, Roland. IDK did he really have a “role” in the game other than to be a player “class”? Same with Krieg. Jamie Lee Curtis plays the normally-NPC Dr. Tannis, and honestly, eh whatever. In the game you’re always having to go do stupid side quests for Tannis and she’s more trouble than anything. But here it works okay, I guess.

Jack Black as “Clapttrap?” Could have been epic. Wasn’t.

But lets get to the biggest problem (well the first one anyway) I had with this movie, and that’s the casting for Lilith. Lilith in the games is like mid-late twenties, yeah? Maybe thirties. I’ve never imagined her as anything else. But here we have fifty-something Cate Blanchett trying to pull off this role. Now, I have nothing against Cate Blanchett. I think she’s a phenomenal actress and could act anyone else under the rug. But FFS she’s fricking my age, and looks every bit of it here. (Sorry, Love!) From the beginning, through the entire thing, I’m just literally wincing at this. Just, “mannnn, you could have done so much better here.” Love you, Cate, but shoulda sat this one out.

Then, there’s the vault. In the games, the vaults are protected by the big bad bosses. Where is the big bad in the movie? Instead we get the CEO of the Atlas corp in a truly forgettable role. You know who should have been the villain of the film?

Handsome Jack. FFS who dropped this ball. You had the perfect villain already written up for you, and you decided, “no, I don’t think we’ll do that. lets do something a little more lame, nay a lot more lame.”

I think if you’d have stuck this movie with some relation to the first installment in the game series, made it follow that a bit more closely, I’d have been 100% on board with pretty much all of it.

As it sits, though, its just way too full of the aforementioned one-liners, bad effects (oh lord some of those…) and other decisions that just didn’t make sense.

I would have taken the extra step and written this from the beginning to hold a solid “R” rating. More innuendo, more language, more over the top violence and gore. FFS give Deadpool a run for his money with this. THAT I was expecting, and I didn’t get it. “OMG its pee!!” just doesn’t cut it.

But you know what, at the end of the day, it still didn’t turn out that bad. I mean, I’m not gonna give it high marks, but still, I didn’t hate it as much as I thought I would. Had they stuck to the source material more, stuck with some of the game elements more, I could have gone higher, but a lowly 3/5, with the caveat that you shouldn’t listen to mainstream critics and tiktok losers.

Now I need to go dust off my physical copy of the games and revisit this madhouse. And dwell on what we could have had.

I’m going to go against the popular opinion and rate this a rather generous 3 out of 5. Like I said, it wasn’t nearly as terrible as I was expecting, but still. We could have had much, much better. I expected much better from Eli Roth especially.