Borderlands (2024)
It’s not a compliment to call Borderlands a throwback to the video game/comic book films of the 1990s. Back then, for the most part, engaging plots, fun characters, and good dialogue were secondary considerations; it was more about special effects, set design, stunt sequences, cheesy one-liners, and constant insider references to the original game/comic book, none of which would be understood or even noticed by anyone outside a small circle of fanatics. This is what Borderlands feels like. Attention is given to all the superficial things, but when it comes to anything more meaningful, more substantive, it was obvious that they were the first things to be tossed away.
This may not have been a problem had an effort been made with the superficial things. Visually, it’s an ugly cross between Star Wars and the Mad Max movie of your choice. The characters are developed on nothing apart from quirks and clichès. The dialogue is awkward and inane. What little story we’re given is not just hackneyed and predictable, it’s all but buried by scene after scene of high-octane shoot-‘em-up violence, many in futuristic tanks and all-terrain vehicles. How strange that director/co-writer Eli Roth couldn’t handle a PG-13 adaptation of a video game series (unplayed by me), especially after setting aside his gory horror sensibilities for the terrifically fun, family friendly The House with a Clock in Its Walls. I guess there’s no middle ground with him.
Set in some space opera universe, we meet Lilith (Cate Blanchett), a hardened bounty hunter with wavy pink hair and total command of her laser blasters. A man named Atlas (Edgar Ramírez) – one of those corporate magnate types whose job is never really explained, but we know he’s rich because he makes frequent use of the most high-end technologies – wants Lilith to track down and rescue his daughter, who was sprung from a prison cell by a soldier gone rogue and taken to the planet Pandora. No, not the lush, bioluminescent Pandora of James Cameron’s Avatar films, but a graffiti-covered junkyard desert planet teeming with thieves, mercenaries, and feral scavengers that do nothing but shoot blasters and beat the crap out of people. There’s also a gigantic alien monster that lives in a desolate cliffs-and-valleys area, which somehow produces urine in geysers. God help you if you drive there with a window rolled down.
Lilith agrees to take the job, despite the fact that Pandora, her home planet, was the scene of a childhood trauma she still hasn’t come to terms with. Upon arriving, she forms a shaky alliance with a ragtag gang of video-game typecasts, including: Roland (Kevin Hart), the soldier who helped Atlas’ daughter escape; Claptrap (voiced by Jack Black), a WALL-E-esque robot whose lame jokes and incessant yammering make him irritating as hell; Dr. Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), the obligatory socially awkward scientist; Krieg (Florian Munteanu) a simple-minded, freakishly muscled behemoth in the vein of Bane from Batman; and Atlas’ daughter herself, the goofy teenager Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), who has an arsenal of stuffed animals rigged to be explosives.
An opening narration, provided by Lilith, tells of a long-gone alien species and the scattered fragments of their technology; though barely explained, Tiny Tina is believed to be a descendant of that ancient species and has been prophesied to open a vault hidden somewhere on Pandora. Quite imaginatively, this vault is called The Vault. It’s said to contain all the secrets of the lost species – hence, all the scummy intergalactic treasure hunters that have taken over the planet. By the way, if it’s a lost species, how can there be a descendant? Never mind. There’s also some vague talk about a Pandoran deity, ultimately revealed in a plot twist so transparent and silly, you’d swear it came from the mind of M. Night Shyamalan.
It should be noted that Lilith and her friends are being tracked by Atlas and his military forces, because of course Atlas has his own ulterior motives when it comes to Tiny Tina. Eluding the bad guys naturally involves meeting a contact at a low-down futuristic bar, and of course the contact is a woman who dresses like a brothel madam – with overly red lips and streaky mascara, no less – and has a voice inspired by Mae West (Gina Gershon). If Roth insisted on relying so heavily on tropes for Borderlands, shouldn’t he at least have paired them with a fully realized screenplay, where story takes precedence over action scenes, pyrotechnics, and CGI? I’m all for escapism, but even then, the standards shouldn’t be so low.
