Borderlands: a dud computer game adaptation from retromeister Eli Roth
A rag-tag celebrity crew that includes Cate Blanchett as a flame-haired bounty hunter is assembled for this expensive, throwaway space western based on the best-selling video game.
A junk-heap of a film set on a junk-heap of a planet, Borderlands – substantially shot by Eli Roth in 2021 with uncredited reshoots by Tim Miller in 2023 – joins the long list of dud computer game adaptations which are entirely derivative of earlier movies, comics, TV shows and toy packaging materials.
Set on a planet called Pandora which shouldn’t be confused with the one in Avatar (2009), released the year the first Borderlands game appeared, this offers a rag-tag crew of squabbling outlaw allies pursued by factions of militarist goons and masked psychos as they assemble plot tokens which access a vault full of technology left behind by a departed super-race.
Flame-haired, fast-draw bounty hunter Lilith (Cate Blanchett) takes the sort of gig Kurt Russell’s cynical Snake Plissken has in John Carpenter’s Escape From… films. Hologram tech tycoon Atlas (Edgar Ramirez), about the fiftieth ‘Evil Elon’ archnemesis in recent cinema, sends Lilith to Pandora to rescue his daughter Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) from kidnapper Roland (Kevin Hart). But it turns out she’s not exactly his daughter, Roland is a good guy and Atlas needs Tina to open the vault but not necessarily to survive the experience. Also pitching in are a masked thug (Florian Munteanu), a backstory-delivering scientist (Jamie Lee Curtis) and a Jack Black-voiced trundling robot (Claptrap) who may well be the most irritating mecha since Twiki from the TV show Buck Rogers in the 25th century (1979-1981).
The aesthetic is modelled on 1980s films like Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone (1983) or Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn (1983) which began as cash-ins on the Star Wars space opera boom but changed tack thanks to the early Mad Max movies creating a new boom for earthbound futuristic car action pictures. The game was a grab-bag homage to not exactly well-remembered films and retromeister Roth and the many other hands involved in this production just add another layer of redundancy to the recycled material. Roth’s reworkings of Eurohorror (the Hostel films), cannibal movies (2013’s The Green Inferno) or minor 1970s exploitation set texts (2015’s Knock Knock) at least suggest some engagement with bygone schlock, but this – possibly his most expensive film – feels like a throwaway.
Typical is a moment where one Roland sacrifices himself so others can escape. The scene is jarring because suddenly we’re asked to feel pathos for someone who has barely registered as a character in the non-stop melée – Hart’s usual comedy patter is usurped by the robot – and who we guess will turn up not dead within a few minutes.
► Borderlands is in UK cinemas now.