Jonah Naplan   August 10, 2024

“I’m getting too old for this shit,” says Cate Blanchett just minutes into “Borderlands,” the new cinematic permutation of a beloved video game that was shelved and re-shot and stuck in development hell for multiple years before finally being dumped into theaters for our consumption. It often looks and feels that way, too, shamefully showing us all its rough edges and skipping around any aspect of what made the video games so great. It’s also a monumental waste of so much talent, between writer/director Eli Roth (whose most recent film “Thanksgiving” was the best slasher project of last year), and every single leading actor in this movie who’ve all proven their theatrical worth—some to the point of awards recognition—in a wide variety of prior films. Blanchett’s line is a double entendre with the tremor of a guillotine blade. Even if she doesn’t exactly realize it yet, she is too old for this and so are we. Like Blanchett, we, the audience, have amassed a certain wisdom—her from years of acting in better films and us from the same time spent watching how video game movies have tried and tried again and again to be successful and have thereby elevated the select few projects that actually are of some redeemable quality. “Borderlands,” however, is one of the worst, a baffling misimagining of a video game world that never quite feels as though any actual humans worked on it, and certainly none that are talented or notable.

Blanchett narrates the entire movie as Lilith, a headstrong bounty hunter tasked with retrieving the daughter of the powerful Atlas (Edgar Ramirez) on the desolate planet known as Pandora. The girl is a sassy agent of destruction named Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), and she’s been kidnapped by the rogue assassin Roland (Kevin Hart) and his masked confidant Krieg (Florian Munteanu) under the impression that she’s the only person who can open up a mysterious vault containing potentially crucial weapons and technology left behind by a powerful alien race called the Eridians centuries ago. A bland encounter and an even more dour chase scene ends up teaming Lilith with these fellow outcasts just because the movie needs it, really cementing its nod to the “Guardians of the Galaxy” franchise without actually being anything close to comparable. The group gains a comrade in the wise Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), who may know a thing or two about how to access the vault. And there’s also a robot named Claptrap (voice of Jack Black) who’s decided he’s a part of the group despite no one really liking him.

Now let me tell you more about Claptrap. The character is designed for comic relief, the same way that Korg in “Thor: Ragnarok” delivered one-liners in an effort to lighten the mood, but everytime that robot opened his mouth, I wanted to leave the theater. He’s so ridiculously annoying, which I think may have only been part of the intention. Whenever something “big” happens, like a reveal, or an explosion, or a fight, Claptrap is always right there with a “funny” quip about what has just occurred. I didn’t laugh a single time. And you won’t either, unless you’re forcing it. If anything, his character only exposes the phoniness of this entire project, telling us what we should think and distracting us from what’s really going on and how it doesn’t actually make much sense. There’s an early scene where all the human characters nearly leave him behind in an effort to get away from an enemy. Nearly. I wish they had never looked back.

Of course, both Blanchett and Curtis, in particular, do take advantage of the poor material that they’ve been given, being the great actresses that they are (it’s important to note for clarity that “Borderlands” was actually filmed before Blanchett shot “TÁR” but still after Curtis did “Everything Everywhere All at Once”), with Blanchett trying her best to uplift her character with a sly smirk and Curtis bringing her usual poise to a role that demands very little personality or emotional nuance. Roth never pulls the right strings to make us care about any of these characters, even when a smidge of pathos is introduced in the third act to shake up the team dynamics. Everyone seems bored, particularly Hart, who looks to be physically tired of the movie he’s in, and Greenblatt (who wouldn’t begin filming “Barbie” for another year) appears to already know she’ll soon be off to bigger and better things.

I could probably forgive some of these gripes if “Borderlands” was at least modestly entertaining or of some value as a loveletter to fans. I guess we can only dream. All of the film’s action is of abysmal composition, with no awareness of geography or space, and there’s not a single setpiece that I’ll still remember by next week. It would maybe help a little more if I could at least see the action, but the cinematic gods did not gift this film with light. A darkened fight in a grimy hallway will, however, stand out as one of the worst composed action setpieces of the year.

“Borderlands” is a movie of zero competence or virtuosity. It’s all just big booms, and big guns and muscles and brawn with no purpose, while the brief flickers of world building don’t suggest that the video games were anything greater. The biggest consequence will be whether or not this film turns people away from playing the games because this is now the expectation for the brand, which is even more of a snake eating its own tail than other IP-driven disasters like “The Garfield Movie” and “Five Nights at Freddy’s.” There’s no heart here, no spirit, no personhood. The movie itself isn’t unlike that dang Claptrap who speaks often about how he can’t die no matter how many times he’s shot. He doesn’t have a soul. The robot excretes all those bullets out of his behind as evidence that he’s empty inside. Yes, it’s insufferable. No, it’s not funny.

Now playing in theaters.