Borderlands

by Mike McGranaghan

Borderlands is perfect viewing for people who thought the Venom pictures were too artsy-fartsy. It’s one of those empty calorie movies where you sit there looking at a screen for 100 minutes yet somehow walk away feeling as though you haven’t actually seen anything.

This video game adaptation from director Eli Roth (Thanksgiving) exemplifies the reason why such productions rarely work well and are often terrible. There is no plot. Instead, it’s a series of missions. The characters must make their way to a certain place. They have to find a special object. They need to traverse peril-filled terrain or shoot down an advancing army of enemies. That’s fine when you’re the player, guiding the action. When you’re a viewer wanting to be entertained, it can be tedious because the part that’s supposed to be fun for you has been taken away, leaving you with only a hollow shell.

In this case, the protagonist is Lilith (Cate Blanchett), a bounty hunter hired to return to her rundown home planet in order to find Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), a teenage girl who may be the key to opening a special vault that contains advanced alien technology. It doesn’t take long to locate Tina, although getting her to safety does require teaming up with her protectors, a soldier named Roland (Kevin Hart) and a muscleman called Krieg (Florian Munteanu), as well as Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), a scientist from Lilith’s past. For good measure, there’s also a wisecracking robot, Claptrap (voiced by Jack Black).

Most of the people in Borderlands have a strange look. Lilith has fire engine-red hair. Tina inexplicably wears bunny ears on her head. Krieg has an odd mask with some sort of breathing apparatus attached to the mouth. There is no development of them beyond their physical appearances. Explaining why we should care about these individuals is not the film’s strong point. Roth and co-writer Joe Abercrombie seem to think that replicating their distinct looks from the game is sufficient. Maybe it will be for viewers who have played that game. But if playing a game is required for a movie to make sense, it’s a bad movie.

A lot of mayhem occurs onscreen, very little of it making anything even approaching sense. Shootouts and chases arrive every so often, just as they do in a video game. None of them are exciting because it’s never entirely clear why they’re happening, aside from the film’s inherent need to work toward an ending. In this case, the plot hinges on a twist that any viewer who’s awake and alert will pick up on long before the movie gets there. An attempt is made to give Lilith an emotional arc at the end. It, too, fails, since the build-up has been excessively thin.

Borderlands only has two saving graces. One is Cate Blanchett, who brings to this dumb movie the same professionalism and dedication that she brings to all her projects. The other is Jack Black, who tosses off a few mildly amusing comments as the robot. Otherwise, the film is just flat characters moving through dull situations in a mission that contains no obvious stakes and delivers an unsatisfying payoff.

Incoherent, chaotic, and overly smug in its nonstop efforts to be hip, Borderlands achieves little more than wasting a lot of money and talent.

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