Bor­der­lands review – rage-quit wor­thy video game slop

With­in mere sec­onds of start­ing, as Cate Blanchett life­less­ly reads an expo­si­tion dump of a mono­logue, Eli Roth’s Bor­der­lands threat­ens to take the wind out of the sails of any­one even mild­ly excit­ed for the con­cept of the video game adap­ta­tion. Her char­ac­ter, Lilith, sets the scene with an air of exhaus­tion in her voice: there’s a plan­et named Pan­do­ra, there’s a vault with untold trea­sures and secrets in it, and every­one is out to find it. As if accom­pa­nied by an off-screen eye-roll, she adds, ​“Sounds like some wacko BS, doesn’t it?”

Every sin­gle minute of Bor­der­lands match­es this ener­gy, by which I mean none. There is no joy to be found in the way that Roth parades out his actors in bad cos­play of char­ac­ters from the series and strips them of any human­i­ty. What­ev­er per­son­al­i­ty or his­to­ry might have exist­ed for these char­ac­ters in-game, from Krieg’s (Flo­ri­an Munteanu) inter­nal per­son­al­i­ty con­flict to Tiny Tina’s (Ari­ana Green­blatt) trau­ma, is no longer here either. These per­sonas aren’t just paper thin, they’re insuf­fer­able – none worse than Jack Black’s end­less ram­bling, which some­how turns the game’s frus­trat­ing­ly talk­a­tive robot com­pan­ion Clap­trap, into some­thing bor­der­ing on unlistenable.

To take a loot­er shoot­er like Bor­der­lands – ulti­mate­ly a video game with a sparse nar­ra­tive and a lot of brash per­sonas designed to either charm or annoy – and try to turn it into a fea­ture film requires a touch of cre­ativ­i­ty. Look no fur­ther than Mon­ster Hunter and the way Paul W.S. Ander­son eschews any giv­en plot by using the fan­ta­sy world of the game as a sand­box. Roth and his writ­ers (some of whom remain uncred­it­ed after aban­don­ing the project) are nev­er able to decide between fideli­ty to the source or com­plete­ly absurd orig­i­nal plot­ting, result­ing in a script that isn’t just lack­ing in the game’s irrev­er­ent sense of humor, but in any cathar­sis for the plot­lines it lazi­ly introduces.

But it all extends so far beyond bad writ­ing. Tonal con­fu­sion exists every­where, down to the per­form­ers them­selves, each one deliv­er­ing their lines with­out an ounce of inspi­ra­tion and oscil­lat­ing blind­ly between snark and sup­posed friend­ship. The weight­less­ness of their words also trans­lates to the way their action scenes play out, with­out a hint of ener­gy and cer­tain­ly with­out any of the gra­tu­itous blood and vio­lence the games are best known for. If Bor­der­lands’ great­est source of inspi­ra­tion (as it seems to be) was Guardians of the Galaxy and James Gunn’s rag-tag team, per­haps it would have served the Bor­der­lands cre­atives bet­ter to think about the way these indi­vid­u­als con­nect and grow over the span of a motion picture.

Instead, Bor­der­lands bar­rels through every­thing it intro­duces. No scene lasts longer than any giv­en fetch quest one might embark on in-game, with chop­py edit­ing that makes each scene feel like it had a ​“skip cutscene” option, and break­neck pac­ing that ren­ders emo­tion­al beat and moment of ten­sion use­less. Roth and his myr­i­ad col­lab­o­ra­tors – many of whom walked away from the project, much like he did before leav­ing it in Tim Miller’s hands – seem to that think some­thing being ​“col­or­ful” means not being void of life aes­thet­i­cal­ly, and, to its cred­it, some of its styling and pro­duc­tion design cer­tain­ly looks nice. How­ev­er, near­ly every shot is buried under visu­al effects that feel painful­ly unre­al, with stiff bod­ies mov­ing against green screens that would make con­tem­po­rary Mar­vel movies’ fake back­grounds look subtle.

While some bad movies have so much bad­ness in them to enjoy they even­tu­al­ly become enter­tain­ing, oth­ers are just too emp­ty to find any redeem­ing fea­ture in. Bor­der­lands is decid­ed­ly the lat­ter, des­tined to not only make those who go in blind regret their deci­sion but to make those who were once enter­tained by the game ques­tion whether or not that was ever true. It strong­ly seems that not a sin­gle per­son involved in its pro­duc­tion gave Bor­der­lands any more of their ener­gy than the bare min­i­mum, and will like­ly nev­er think about it again – and nei­ther will I.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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