Borderlands
LIONSGATE
After years of sitting in a dust closet hoping it’ll never get released, Lionsgate thought it was a good idea to unleash Borderlands into the world, a movie that would’ve killed many careers if its stars weren’t already established A-listers (and, in two cases, Oscar winners). Shot in 2021 by Eli Roth as an R-rated adaptation of the famous 2K game with reshoots in 2023 supervised by Deadpool filmmaker Tim Miller, the PG-13 transposition of the game harkens back to the days when video game adaptations received a whopping 0 to 5% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes during the time where Uwe Boll would crank out one (or even two) video game movie a year.
Dare this critic say that Boll’s video game oeuvre has more panache and verve than Roth’s (and Miller’s) listless PG-13 Guardians of the Galaxy ripoff? Say whatever you want about Boll’s filmography. Still, the cemetery scene in House of the Dead has far more energy and personality than anything Roth (and Miller) present in this 102-minute nightmare where no actor seems to enjoy themselves, and no audience member is. Hell, this critic began to feel ill shortly after the IMAX screening of Borderlands and came back a day later with a positive test for COVID-19 (no joke, and is writing this review a week after seeing the film due to being very ill). Perhaps an omen for the lack of taste and thought this entire affair is.
There’s no denying that Roth is a capable filmmaker who has already proven themselves at helming effective independent genre fare, such as Cabin Fever and Hostel, and studio productions at a larger scale. The House with a Clock in Its Walls is severely underrated. It deftly captures the magic of a 1980s kiddie horror flick without being too scary, while his feature-length Thanksgiving may be the most politically cogent and effective slasher he’s ever done.
If anything, Borderlands could’ve been another great blockbuster that would not only tip the hat to what made the games so fun to play but would also tap into Roth’s action filmmaking sensibilities, which audiences have not seen displayed at such a scale. Unfortunately, menace to cinema Avi Arad is probably the biggest culprit that forced the R-rated shot film to be turned into a PG-13-rated family comedy, and this sole corporate decision completely sinks a disastrous picture into completely irredeemable and often embarrassing territory.
It may even be a poetic moment for Cate Blanchett, who, at the end of Todd Field’s Tár, attempts a career resurgence by conducting the score for Monster Hunter: World in front of a group of cosplayers at a video game convention. Now, here she is playing a literal video game character, and it may very well be rock bottom for an actress who’s usually careful with the roles she undertakes. Having previously worked with Roth in The House with a Clock in Its Walls, returning to collaborate with someone she enjoys seems like a no-brainer. But no sensible person would ever put themselves through what Roth (or Miller, no one knows exactly who shot what in the final cut) subjects Blanchett to during the climax of Borderlands.
Without giving anything away, the ending harkens back closely to the insulting series finale of Ali Selim’s Secret Invasion, an action scene so creatively bankrupt and braindead one even wonders if a human approved the screenplay and directed what’s on screen. No sane human being would ever want to see Blanchett (as Lilith) in a situation akin to Emilia Clarke’s G’iah in Secret Invasion. Yet, here she is, with the worst performance of her career, one so damaging to a practically-perfect body of work she may very well disown it very soon. Funnily enough, Jamie Lee Curtis, the other Oscar-winning actor (who undeservedly won for the worst performance of her career in the Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once), fares far better than Lilith as Dr. Tannis (and even goes to the John Kramer school of de-aging with a horrible, Out of the Shadow-esque wig during a flashback).
She’s not particularly got, but the least offensive character of the bunch, which is comprised of Roland (Kevin Hart, who gets peed on his face and then extensively talks about how pee got on his face…that’s the type of humour the movie deals with here), Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt, reduced to blowing everything up), Krieg (Florian Munteanu, who developed an entertaining sense of humour in Destin Daniel Cretton’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, but has nothing to do here), and Claptrap (Jack Black or Jablinski Games, but he doesn’t seem to understand good video game adaptations).
The gang of misfits must unite to defeat Deukelian Atlas (Edgar Ramirez, a disposable antagonist with no sense of development), who wants to open a vault for reasons that are too nebulous to explain (no, it’s not the COVID that made this critic forget, the motivations are this half-baked that it makes no sense even to bother explaining). A series of mindless action sequences ensue, none entertaining, lacking the urgency and nail-biting violence of Thanksgiving’s Black Friday sequence, which turned our mindless consumers into symbolic representations of George A. Romero’s Zombies perusing a mall in Dawn of the Dead.
Bouts of hacked-to-shreds (clearly R-rated, but cut down to PG-13) action is sandwiched in between moments of unfunny comedy (jokes on bodily humour or Claptrap going SCANNING SCANNING SCANNING!), and rinse and repeat until the aforementioned climax so bewildering someone will not escape from this film unscathed. It won’t be Blanchett. It won’t be Curtis, nor Hart (really, the least of the film’s problems, but he has material that does him zero favors). Perhaps Jack Black, but only because he may have destroyed his career by severing ties with his best friend and collaborator over an admittedly tasteless joke, but not the one to finish the legacy of Tenacious D over.
No, the one person who may not get out of this film unscathed is Roth himself, even if he may not take any credit for the final cut. To be honest, none of the movie contains Roth’s eye. He may not be a crowd-pleasing filmmaker, but he knows how to shoot effective action and has done large-scale productions that worked. Here, the lively colors and expansive hairdos can’t compensate for the bland, almost unfinished green-screen environments that populate action scenes or even set environments during dialogue sequences that go virtually nowhere. There’s no life in any of the frames created by cinematographer Rogier Stoffers, almost as if Roth is on sleep mode (or the current cut playing in empty cinemas is so vapid of soul that his imprint is completely gone). Regardless, it pales in comparison to Thanksgiving, which creatively resurrected his filmmaking prowess via the studio system and was so successful Sony greenlit a sequel a week after its release.
Borderlands will never get a sequel, but beyond what Roth is working now, will he ever get out of this mess? It’s unfortunate that audiences will never see his completed vision, but there’s little doubt it will be any better than what’s on screen, especially in the wake of Craig Mazin having requested to take his name off the screenplay once Roth and Joe Crombie made numerous changes that allegedly diluted Mazin’s material. Who knows what happened, and it will be interesting to see if there will be any investigative pieces released on what could be the biggest flop in modern cinema history, but one thing’s for sure: Uwe Boll would’ve made a better film, and there’s no denying it. He may not be an artist, but he would’ve kept it as nasty and as gnarly as the original games are. Postal undefeated.