How the Hell Did They Let Borderlands Out of the Vault?
For a while there, Borderlands seemed like it would be forever locked in the same vault that plays such a central role in its story. They’ve been developing the adaptation of the shoot-and-loot videogame franchise for almost a decade. Like an unskilled co-op partner you’re carrying through the planet of Pandora for the first time, the film was dropped then picked up, revived then abandoned, resurrected only to be hurried to the finish line. Now that it’s out, it’s clear that filmmaker Eli Roth and his team have done something incredible: They’ve returned us to the Golden Age of videogame movies, back when they were all pieces of shit.
In the face of unprecedented videogame movie success, where both Sonic and Mario have defied common industry wisdom, Borderlands returns to the old reliable formula of slapping Borderlands textures over a generic fetch quest narrative and sprinkling loose lore references into an anonymous script. Aside from these recognizable keywords and the cosplay costuming, Borderlands could be called anything and set anywhere.
The games made their name with addictive action, which never stopped lampshading its own collect-and-then-collect-some-more mayhem, and a cel-shaded style that gave its cartoonish humor an aesthetic to match. But it’s hard to maintain irreverence when film adaptations treat their source material like gospel, and their Easter eggs like holy relics. The games’ cheeky, hyper-online, self-aware and sometimes gratingly “random” humor has been extinguished. Its bloodthirsty, over-the-top junkyard planet has been PG-13’d into a barren waste indistinguishable from all those MCU green-screen setpieces filled with safe-looking violence. Borderlands also has the misfortune to have its shirtless psychos hit the big screen the same year that George Miller returned with Furiosa to once again prove his post-apocalyptic dominance. These Z-grade War Boys will never see Valhalla.
In this generic world lives our generic hero, Lilith (Cate Blanchett), whose performance and voiceover come through gritted teeth, like her character from Tár graduated from conducting videogame concerts to starring in their movies. She has the dead eyes of a TV star asked to do a “fun one” at a Comic-Con photo op one too many times. Lilith is a bounty hunter, who is hired to return Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) to her rich and powerful father Atlas (Edgar Ramírez). Tina was kidnapped by Roland (Kevin Hart), one of Atlas’ ex-mercenaries, and the masked muscleman Krieg (Florian Munteanu), who seems to be here just to remind everyone about the game’s box art.
They have even less going on inside their costumes than Lilith. Hart is so miscast it almost seems like a joke in and of itself—put a comedian the size of the little girl he’s smuggling in the tough guy role—but it’s not. It’s just a mistake. At least Blanchett, though visibly bored, can strike a heroic pose. Hart sometimes seems to take a moment to realize the camera has started rolling. Munteanu has no discernable lines, nor do we see his face. Greenblatt, now in the unenviable position of providing all the energy for the film, forges ahead with pageant-like falseness.
They make for an adventuring party straight out of a randomized character creator, as Lilith quickly drops the bounty hunting business to ally with Roland, Tina and Krieg for reasons beyond comprehension. Jamie Lee Curtis, ten years older than Blanchett, joins them as a scientist who was colleagues with Lilith’s mom. The squad then super-sizes one MacGuffin search (the girl) into a Big MacGuffin search (some keys that open up a mythical vault).