In the distant future, a gruff bounty hunter named Lilith (Cate Blanchett) must return to her run down home planet of Pandora in order to rescue Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), the daughter of corporate magnate Atlas (Edgar Ramirez), who has been kidnapped by rogue soldier Roland (Kevin Hart) and hulking madman Krieg (Florian Munteanu).
I'm so happy Eli Roth has brought back the 2000s videogame adaptation.
Well, that's a little unfair: this is not an Eli Roth film. Suffering from a, shall we say "troubled" production", this has been going on and off for a while now, and finally staggering into cinemas this year. I'll confess that I was never a "Borderlands" fan - I found it repetitive, grating and boring, and am also hesitant to ever give money to Grease Baron Randy Pithcofrd. I have always had a troubled relationship with Roth's art: he loves the kind of trashy movies I do, but has always struggled with making them fun and likable. Only "Thanksgiving" (which he dropped out of "Borderlands" to make) really turned me back around to liking him, and his kids' movie "The House With a Clock in its Walls" is easily his best work. On paper, Roth is the best kind of person to make a high energy, blood fuelled adaptation of "Borderlands".
Too bad it's an Ari Arad movie.
Yes folks, it is that refreshing kind of shittiness where the stench of production interference is lingering over it: much like that last terrible "Hellboy" reboot (they even use "Supermassive Blackhole" here too), where the movie is sliced to ribbons and all traces of Eli Roth are sanded away. Therer are moments when it should be an Eli Roth bloodbath: Lilith uses a sniper rifle to take out a man with a headshot, but there is no blood; and the gang turning an acid pipe on approaching goons, only for us to see nothing as they just fall over. A bloodless "Borderlands" is the least of its worries (it's still based on "Borderlands") but it is an enormous strike against the project, sucking and draining all life from it. I'll just say that it was bold of them to have a trailer for "Kneecap" before this. The editing and fight scenes are reminiscent of "Suicide Squad" - lots of cutting and jarring nonsense which makes it hard to realise where anybody is in relation to anything else. It's all just, fucking amateur hour, and a clear sign of the tinkering and dicing behind the scenes.
But okay, fine, the movie has poor fight scenes (all of them, to a T, are a character shooting a gun off screen and then cutting to a new scene of a character being shot, bloodlessly, and usually from a different angle to where the bullet should come from. Fucking shocking.), Civvie11 in his "Max Payne" video effortlessly broke down one of them better than I could, if you want to give it a whirl. Honestly Civvie11 is fun anyway...
But fine, poor fight scenes? As long as we can giggle at some jokes and-
NO.
Ooooooh boy.
Wow.
Okay.
So.
I'd like to thank the makers of the film for getting one thing right: they've actually made a film which accurately captures the writing of "Borderlands". This is the most obnoxious, tiring, dreadful scripting I've seen: all of the humour is characters yattering at a million miles an hour, repeating the obvious things on screen. "Time to make it rain! ... With your body parts!" Yeesh.
I don't fault the actors, nobody could make this dialogue enjoyable or interesting, and we know this because they cast Jack Black and he was honestly the worst one. My partner was writhing in her seat and begging for his character to die every scene, that bad was his writing, and it gave me some form of enjoyment in proceedings.
But writing obnoxious characters is Eli Roth's bread and butter, right? Well, no, as we've established: this is an Ari Arad movie.
The characters are annoying in a new, fresh way uniquely different to Roth's brand of terrible: and by the time we're expected to believe that they're friends in a cut price "Guardians of the Galaxy" moment - I genuinely had to ask why. They've done no bonding or chatting, it's all been them hurling quips, and one scene of Cate Blanchett talking to Ariana Greenblatt. Poor Ariana Greenblatt, by the way: she seems to have been placed in an arms race with Jack Black for who can be more annoying on screen, but I'll give her a slight pass as she's a child, and a Gearbox approximation of "quirky and funny". Though, judging by what Randall Greasy Pitchford keeps with his company documents, maybe we should ask around about the thought process behind that character... I imagine that the scripting was thus:
And then there's the colour and design angle: some of it looks good and delightful:there are bright poppy colours to lure the attention and distract you from the dialogue on screen, a close attempt to that cel-shading we've had in the games. And Gina Gershon shows up for 6 minutes as Mad Moxi in Jessica Nigri cosplay, and it's cute. But then, in between rough and raw greenscreen, we get the market: which looks like an aisle from a convention warehouse, honestly it's rough. But by that point I was bored and checked out, I spent about 6 minutes going "Wait, is that Jessica Nigri behind Gina Gershon?!" And it turns out that she was in this too! A cute cameo, I'll give them that.
A representation of Nigri and Gershon on set.
I'll give the movie 2 other positives: Jamie Lee Curtis is such a talented actor that when given the part of Dr Tanis (a nothing character), she chose to play it in the least obvious way, and I like that. It's still not good (it's "Borderlands" dialogue) but kudos to her.
And Florian Munteanu got the one legitimate laugh from me.
