Borderlands: Like Watching Someone Play a First Person Shooter Game - Badly
By Jim Slotek
Rating: D
Even non-gamers like me know there are huge numbers of people willing to go online and passively watch people play video games. I will concede that if the player is a superlative talent, it might be an entertaining pastime.
The dead-on-arrival movie Borderlands, based on the popular first-person-shooter franchise, is kind of like watching a video game in the worst sense. People go to various places in various directions, shooting on the run, headed God knows where, seldom stopping for a breath let alone an authentic moment.
If this were a game, the frozen looks on the characters’ faces could be construed as the CGI “uncanny valley,” that distance that still exists between generated human beings and real-life ones.
But given that these are real human actors, with names like Cate Blanchett and Jamie Lee Curtis, the look on their faces might simply express concern at what they signed up for.
As a movie, Eli Roth’s Borderlands seems like it was created by AI from a database of nerd pop cultural references and influences. It takes place on a planet called Pandora, though it resembles Star Wars’ Tatooine more than Avatar’s verdant moon.
It’s a desiccated, wretched hive of scum and villainy, whose dusty Fury Road-like demolition-derby-driving inhabitants all search in vain for The Vault. Said Vault contains the powerful secrets of the Eridians, a people who once colonized the galaxy and now are no more. (Kind of like the Progenitors on Star Trek).
We meet interstellar bounty hunter Lilith (Blanchett) swilling whiskies in a bar and randomly killing tough guys who aggressively approach her with a business offer. Atlas (Edgar Ramírez), the slimy head of the slimy interstellar Atlas Corporation, offers her boodles of space cash to go to Pandora and rescue his daughter Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt). Lilith is initially reluctant because she was born on Pandora, and was orphaned there. But space money talks.
Tiny Tina, however, is already in the hands of a couple of protectors, a short-statured soldier named Roland (Kevin Hart) and a giant, slow-witted muscle-head named Krieg (Florian Munteanu), who seems to channel Guardians of the Galaxy’s Drax.
And what’s missing? Oh yeah. There’s a wise-cracking robot named Claptrap, voiced by Jack Black, who was clearly given free rein in the sound studio to riff a constant barrage of grating wisecracks. It’s no small accomplishment when Kevin Hart does not play the most annoying character in a movie.
And there’s Tannis (Curtis), a Pandora-based scientist who’s been keeping track of the various objects-of-power that will give the chosen one access to the Vault.
Said “chosen one” is presumably the bratty Tiny Tina, who knows she’s special and is ready to toss an exploding teddy bear at anyone who disagrees. With “dad” and a small army of mercenaries wearing what look like darker Imperial Storm Trooper suits in hot pursuit, there is much running, shooting, and narrow escapes for the first two acts.
And then, for some reason, Borderlands becomes a superhero movie. Try not to think of Captain Marvel when that happens.
An hour and 40 minutes of noise without any tension or sense of purpose, Borderlands would be Exhibit Z in the conventional wisdom that video games don’t transfer well filmically – that is, if recent efforts like The Last of Us or Fallout hadn’t proved otherwise.
Borderlands. Directed by Eli Roth. Starring Cate Blanchett, Jamie Lee Curtis and Ariana Greenblatt. In August 9.