Borderlands review: There's no real spark to this bland video game adaptation
Eli Roth's film is a load of old sci-fi hokum riding on a wave of irreverent, often juvenile humour.
Screwball space opera game adaptation Borderlands opens with a typically corny voice-over introducing us to the key points of the backstory: long-lost all-powerful beings, abandoned hell planet, secret treasure, blah, blah, blah. Then it turns all that round and sums it up as "wacky BS!".
It’s pretty much a microcosm for the next hour and a half (although arguably there’s more plot in the voice-over than the rest of the film). Because Borderlands is a load of old sci-fi hokum riding on a wave of irreverent, often juvenile humour.
Directed by Eli Roth, who’s better known for cult horror faves such as Cabin Fever (2002) and Hostel (2005), Borderlands is based on a violent but darkly comic series of first-person shooter games, and while it’s taken some liberties with the characters and story elements, aesthetically and tonally it captures the anarchic action, cartoonish setting and unfeasibly large weaponry of its source material.
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Cate Blanchett, clearly having a ball in her first action hero role, plays Lilith, a bounty hunter hired to find Tina, the kidnapped daughter of a rich and powerful interplanetary dodgy geezer. Tina’s somewhere on the blighted planet of Pandora, a hellhole that is usually only visited by "vault hunters", seeking the location of a legendary power source.
It’s also Lilith’s home planet. This is, of course, relevant. Not so much because it leads to a big revelation, but because it’s one of the few character-building elements in the film.
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Mostly, the characters, including the former soldiers who join Lilith’s gang, Roland (Kevin Hart) and Krieg (Florian Munteanu), are just here to shoot guns, kick things and shout a lot.
There’s also a comedy robot, Claptrap, voiced by Jack Black, who is exactly what you’d expect from a comedy robot voiced by Jack Black – occasionally the best thing in the film, but often just irritating.
To call it light on plot would be like calling The Artist (2011) light on dialogue. But Borderlands is certainly fast-paced and action-packed to the point of the relentless, as it lurches from one set piece to the next with barely a chance to catch breath.
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And they’re perfectly fine set pieces, boasting some well-shot action with adequate FX (mostly, anyway – quality control does wobble towards the end with some very silly, cheap-looking CG at the climax, which is an odd choice of where to start scrimping on the budget).
The production design is also impressive, with an attention to world-building detail that’s absent from the script.
The cast does its best with the meagre material. Blanchett and the ever-dependable Jamie Lee Curtis as a twitchy scientist both act above and beyond the call of duty.
But there’s simply no real spark to the film. For all its constant action and gags, there’s an oddly lifeless, over-engineered feel to the whole affair. In interviews, Roth has said he was influenced by films like Escape From New York (1981) and Barbarella (1968), but the result is more Tank Girl (1995).
It feels like it’s aiming for a James Gunn vibe – Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) meets a less potty-mouthed The Suicide Squad (2021) (because, unlike the Borderlands games which have a M for mature rating, the film is a 12A) – but it simply doesn’t have the underlying heart or subversive wit of those films.
Its anarchy is more contrived, its humour is less nuanced. Hell, it uses the line, "Let’s kick ass!" without a hint of irony.
The end result is a blandly efficient action movie that inoffensively fills up its running time, but leaves very little impression. You could just as well watch a snow globe in a tumble drier for 90 minutes.
Borderlands is now showing in UK cinemas.
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