BORDERLANDS (2024)

Genre: Action/Adventure
Director: Eli Roth
Cast: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Edgar Ramirez, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu, Gina Gershon, Jamie Lee Curtis
Runtime: 1 hr 41 mins
Rating: PG13 (Some Violence)
Released By: Encore Films
Official Website: 

Opening Day: 8 August 2024

Synopsis: Based on one of the best-selling videogame franchises of all time, welcome to Borderlands. Lilith (Blanchett), an infamous treasure hunter with a mysterious past, reluctantly returns to her home planet of Pandora to find the missing daughter of Atlas (Ramirez), the universe’s most powerful S.O.B. She forms an unexpected alliance with a ragtag team of misfits – Roland (Hart), once a highly respected soldier, but now desperate for redemption; Tiny Tina (Greenblatt), a feral pre-teen demolitionist; Krieg (Munteanu), Tina’s musclebound, rhetorically challenged protector; Tannis (Curtis), the scientist who’s seen it all; and Claptrap (Black), a persistently wiseass robot. These unlikely heroes must battle alien monsters and dangerous bandits to find and protect the missing girl, who may hold the key to unimaginable power. The fate of the universe could be in their hands – but they’ll be fighting for something more: each other. 

Movie Review:

We’ve never played the 2009 sci-fi shooter RPG on which this movie is supposedly based on, so pardon us for not knowing how or what certain characters or situations from the game should be. What we were instead looking forward to was an off-kilter, wacky adventure comedy, not quite unlike Marvel’s ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ – and despite what others might think, we wouldn’t have minded if it turned out looking much like ‘GotG’ as long as it were similarly be filled with wit and heart.

Unfortunately, this messy and unexciting video-game adaptation hardly lives up to any sort of expectation. It offers only snatches of crude enjoyment that do not justify a somewhat interminable one-and-a-half hours – like how Kevin Hart’s rogue soldier Roland quickly discards the gothy Stormtrooper get-up that he first appears in, sneering, ‘What a stupid helmet’; or how Cate Blanchett’s bounty hunter Lilith cannot quite care to let a new prospective employer or his goons finish talking before shooting them; or how Ariana Greenblatt’s unhinged teenager Tiny Tina seems to have an endless store of exploding stuffed bunny dolls.

Aside from these occasional bits of anarchist humour though, ‘Borderlands’ is busy but ultimately boring. The MacGuffin here is a vault hidden on the planet of Pandora, which contains valuable technology left behind by an extinct alien race called the Eridians; no thanks to the vault, Pandora is now overrun by corporations, criminals and treasure hunters. One such corporation is Atlas, whose founder of the same name (Edgar Ramirez) hires Lilith to find Tiny Tina, believing her to be one of three keys needed to open the vault. Long story short, despite her initial reservations at returning to Pandora, Lilith finds Atlas’ monetary offer too good to pass up, and upon landing on the planet, quickly forms a ragtag alliance with Tiny, Roland, their hulking partner Krieg (Florian Munteanu) and a sassy robot Claptrap (voiced by Jack Black).

What ensues is a chaotic road trip that takes the unlikely band of heroes across the planet, from a flatland called Piss Wash Gully (take that literally) to a bustling city called Sanctuary to a vast underground maze known as the Caustic Caverns and lastly to none other than the Great Vault itself. Each of these is a set-piece in and of itself, but there is little inspiration in any of these loud, frenetic sequences; other than a whole lot of pew-pew-pew gunplay in equally grungy settings, there really isn’t much to distinguish one from the other, and for that matter, for any of our heroes to truly flex their respective strengths in combat. Not even the needle-drops can enliven the action, or for that matter, the energy that Blanchett tries to inject into the leaden proceedings.

Oh yes, say what you will about how the Oscar winner is slumming here, but Blanchett carries her role with much pizazz – and we’re not just talking about how cool she looks with holsters strapped across her hips ready for some lightning-fast gunslinging. Her fellow Oscar winner Jamie Lee Curtis also acquits herself well in a smaller role, playing an eccentric xeno-archeologist named Tannis. Alas, the same cannot be said of the rest of the storied cast; in particular, Hart barely registers after the aforementioned quippy start, with his natural humour oddly tamped down, and Black is stuck with unfunny wisecracks that are not much better than a visual gag of Claptrap expelling bullets in a crude torrent after taking fire in a gunfight.

To be frank, we’re not even sure if the blame should fall on director Eli Roth, notwithstanding that both the movie and the story are credited to him. While he is no James Gunn, Roth is more than capable of pulling together a delightfully gonzo adventure, and it is indeed surprisingly this cluttered caper is the best that he and co-writer Joe Crombie (whom we suspect is a pseudonym for someone who did not want his real name on this project) could have come up with, especially given the rich source material available through the bestselling video game series. As it stands, this final product is sloppily assembled, and smacks of too many cooks post-production, so much so that Craig Mazin (co-creator and co-writer of HBO’s ‘The Last of Us’) reportedly chose to remove his name from the project.

That said, it doesn’t take familiarity with the games to know that ‘Borderlands’ won’t satisfy that core audience, or we dare say, any audience. It isn’t utterly unwatchable, but what made it onscreen is hardly worthy of the amount of talent involved – and that is a pity, considering the number of years it purportedly took for a big-screen adaptation of the series to come to fruition, hopes which were further raised by the pedigree of the likes of Blanchett, Hart, Black and Curtis. The only silver lining is that it leaves the door wide open for a reboot some time down the road, one that would truly channel the gleefully perverse and graphic nature of the games into an R-rated anarchy that could very well give ‘Deadpool’ a run for his money.

Movie Rating:

(Barely borderline watchable, this cluttered, uninspired and unexciting adaptation of the bestselling video games is hardly worthy of the pedigree involved, or for that time, your time in the cinema)

Review by Gabriel Chong