‘Borderlands’ Review: Lock This Disaster in a Vault and Throw Away the Key

Was Madame Web just the warm-up for a bigger blockbuster disaster on the horizon? Lionsgate’s adaptation of the video game franchise Borderlands – credited to director Eli Roth, but up for debate as to how much of an influence he had on the finished product – certainly shares many of the same dubious qualities. It’s a similarly incompetent work of storytelling that struggles to disguise its post-production butchering, and an attempt to will a new franchise into existence that audiences already know won’t come to pass before sitting down to see it. But that’s where the similarities end, because Borderlands is the worst kind of bad movie; the type devoid of any offbeat quirks that could propel it to a second life as a cult classic, feeling insufferable and overlong at a brisk 102 minutes because of its sheer lack of originality. 

How unoriginal is Borderlands? The first five minutes offer up a fourth-wall breaking exposition dump voiceover – the first of many signs that this was re-edited within an inch of its life – a world-weary character (Cate Blanchett’s bounty hunter Lilith) introduced saying she’s “getting too old for this shit,” and The Heavy’s indie-soul earworm “How You Like Me Now” appearing as a needle-drop. If you told the average audience member this has been held in a vault since 2011, and not 2021 when it was filmed, they’d likely believe you. The only real sign that this was made more recently is the shameless way in which it attempts to mimic the Guardians of the Galaxy formula in the characterization of its band of unlikely outlaws, who come together shortly after Lilith’s mission to capture Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), a daughter of the billionaire Atlas (Edgar Ramírez), goes awry.  

There’s the not-as-tough-as-he-looks mercenary (Kevin Hart’s Roland), the beefed-up himbo warrior (Florian Munteanu’s Krieg), and worst of all, wisecracking robot sidekick Claptrap (Jack Black), who is written to fit the mold of Rocket Raccoon but winds up far closer to Chappie. The robot has several near-death experiences, and each time he survives, I guarantee you will hear an audible disappointment from the audience. Unlike the other characters, it’s never quite clear why he’s there, and each awful one-liner made me wonder why this metal monstrosity survived countless rounds of studio notes to appear in this clearly bastardized final cut. 

From that early point, watching Borderlands becomes an exercise in spotting the very specific plot details lifted from more interesting properties. Having not played the source material, I can’t speak as to whether a plot about “vault hunting” has been taken directly from Fallout, or whether an overarching search for a girl who is the key to uncovering a greater plane of existence has been borrowed wholesale from The Fifth Element. What I do know is that, without any personality of its own to speak of, these are the clearest signs that this movie has been reassembled by a committee tasked with making sure it safely follows as many tried-and-tested formulas as possible.  

It only made me more fascinated as to what Roth’s original cut must have looked like; he’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but you’d be hard pressed to argue that his work lacks an identity. His Joe Dante-inspired YA horror throwback The House With The Clock In Its Walls – where he previously worked with Blanchett and Black – was a sign that he could make broader, family-friendly entertainment without sanding down his edges too much. The only sign that this is a Roth movie is the number of obvious references to other movies it wears on its sleeve, although it’s obvious they haven’t been included with the deliberate intent you’d find in his cine-literate horror efforts; each brazen similarity to another franchise has the mark of a panicked studio exec convinced they can make this a hit if they just keep making tweaks. 

If HBO’s The Last of Us and Amazon’s Fallout series appeared to show that the video game adaptation curse has finally lifted, Borderlands is a thudding reminder that material like this struggles to come to life in a different medium. Several set pieces – from Lilith’s first confrontation with Tina, to the whole gang crossing a rickety bridge over an acid lake – don’t even try to hide that they were originally designed as playable tasks. Watching them here, though, I never felt like I was watching someone else play a video game. It’s much worse than that, each challenge so boring in its conception that I wondered why anybody would be excited enough to keep playing, when they could put down their controller and do anything else instead.  

You may think this makes Borderlands sound like a bad movie for the ages, but if you want the pure unadulterated joy of one, revisit Madame Web instead; it is every bit as incompetently made but feels like a singularly strange object. There is nothing as unusual to be found here even as a cinematic disaster; it falls far short of expectations and will be swiftly forgotten, destined to be buried deep in a vault by all involved. No matter how bad things get, we will always deserve better bad movies than this.

Grade: D

Borderlands opens in theaters on August 9 from Lionsgate.

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Alistair Ryder

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