Nerdly » ‘Borderlands’ Blu-ray Review

07th Nov2024

‘Borderlands’ Blu-ray Review

by Matthew Turner

Stars: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Edgar Ramírez, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu, Gina Gershon, Jamie Lee Curtis | Written by Eli Roth, Joe Crombie | Directed by Eli Roth

Directed by Eli Roth, Borderlands is an adaptation of the popular video game series developed by Gearbox Software. Essentially an action thriller about a rag-tag gang of space mercenaries, it tries hard to generate Guardians of the Galaxy vibes, but is let down by a lack of chemistry between the cast, largely flat direction and a series of uninspired fight scenes.

The story centres on kick-ass bounty hunter Lilith (Cate Blanchett), who’s hired to find Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), the missing daughter of business tycoon Atlas, the richest and most powerful man in the universe. To do so, Lilith has to return to her home planet of Pandora, where she quickly finds Tina and discovers that she may be a long-prophesied child who holds the key to a vast alien treasure.

It soon becomes apparent that various other parties are after Tina as well. To that end, Lilith teams up with various other characters to protect her, including mercenary Roland (Kevin Hart), wise-cracking robot Claptrap (Jack Black), musclebound heavy Krieg (Florian Munteanu) and, eventually, scientist Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), who has a connection to Lilith.

In Blanchett’s case, you can just about see what attracted her to the material – her bright red, flick-bob hairdo is easily the best thing in the film and she does at least get to look pretty cool throughout. But the other characters are so flat and one-note that it’s almost painful to watch – why cast Kevin Hart if you’re not going to give him anything funny to do or say?

That’s not to say there’s no humour in Borderlands – there is, but it’s entirely provided by Jack Black’s Claptrap, and if you don’t find Claptrap’s claptrap funny, it quickly becomes annoying. Indeed, the only person in the movie who seems to be having any fun is Gina Gershon, who has a couple of scenes as a Space Madam and uses them to do a low-key Mae West impression.

The least you could expect from this sort of thing would be a decent action sequence, but they’re all very flat and uninspired. Accordingly, there’s not a single stand-out set-piece and the majority of the action consists of boring, poorly staged shoot-outs. A late-arriving plot development promises to spice things up a bit in the action department, but even that only amounts to a bit of lazily deployed CGI.

In fairness, there is the occasional bit of visual imagination. Borderlands borrows the conceit of electronic hologram masks from the games, but once again fails to do anything interesting with that idea.

The plot doesn’t really make sense either, even on a basic level. Why has Atlas paid Lilith such a vast amount of money to find his daughter when he clearly has plenty of free minions who are perfectly capable of doing the same job? There is a potential answer to that question that might have been interesting, but the script doesn’t care enough to provide it.

Ultimately, Blanchett’s presence (and hairdo) ensures that this remains just about watchable, but the rest of it is so lifeless that it’ll just make you wish you were watching Guardians of the Galaxy again instead. Or, even better, Battle Beyond the Stars.