Borderlands

I watched Borderlands on a Tuesday afternoon while my neighbor was power-washing their driveway, and I have to be honest: the rhythmic, mindless drone of the water hitting the pavement was significantly more compelling than the dialogue on my screen. This is a film that arrived in 2024 with the heavy thud of a missed opportunity, a $115 million neon-drenched shrug that vanished from theaters so quickly I’m half-convinced it was a collective fever dream.

As a fan of the games, I wanted to love the chaos. As a fan of cinema, I just wanted a reason to stay in my seat. What we got instead was a curious artifact of the "Franchise Saturation" era—a movie that tries so hard to be Guardians of the Galaxy that it forgets to have a personality of its own.

The Oscar-Winner Wasteland

The weirdest thing about Borderlands isn't the psychopathic bandits or the giant urine-spewing monsters; it’s the cast list. Seeing Cate Blanchett—a woman who usually breathes the rarified air of high-stakes drama—sporting a fire-engine red wig and spinning revolvers as Lilith is a cognitive dissonance I wasn't prepared for. She’s doing her absolute best, projecting a "cool aunt at a rave" energy that almost saves the first act. She’s leaning into the pulp, but she’s trapped in a script that gives her nothing but exposition and weary one-liners.

Then there’s Kevin Hart as Roland. He is about as convincing as a grizzled tactical soldier as I am as a professional deep-sea diver. Hart is a charismatic guy, but casting him as the "straight man" soldier feels like a waste of his comedic timing and a misunderstanding of the character. On the flip side, Jamie Lee Curtis pops up as Tannis, looking like she wandered off the set of a much better movie to help out a friend. The chemistry between this group of "unlikely heroes" feels less like an unexpected alliance and more like a group of people waiting for their trailers to be hitched to their cars so they can go home.

A PG-13 Sledgehammer

Director Eli Roth is famous for "splat-pack" horror like Hostel, so you’d expect his version of the planet Pandora to be gritty, gross, or at least visually daring. Instead, the film feels like it was passed through a studio-mandated woodchipper to ensure a PG-13 rating. The action choreography is frantic but weightless. When Florian Munteanu (playing the hulking Krieg) swings a buzz-axe, you don’t feel the crunch; you just see a blur of digital sparks.

The pacing is breathless in a way that suggests the editors were terrified the audience might look too closely at the plot. We jump from a desert chase to a sewer fight to a vault opening with zero room for the world to breathe. For a film about a planet that is supposed to be a character in itself—a trash-heap of corporate greed and madness—the sets feel remarkably like, well, sets. It lacks the tactile, dusty grime that made the games feel alive. Even the visual effects, which should be the star of a $115 million production, often look like they were finished during a particularly stressful lunch break.

The Franken-Movie Production

If you’re wondering why the movie feels a bit disjointed, the behind-the-scenes stories provide the answer. It’s a classic contemporary cinema tragedy. Filming actually wrapped in 2021, but it sat on a shelf for years. Tim Miller (the Deadpool director) was eventually brought in for two weeks of reshoots because Roth was busy with his horror hit Thanksgiving. When you have two directors with wildly different sensibilities swapping spit on a project, the result is usually a tonal mess.

There’s also the mystery of the screenplay. One of the credited writers, Joe Crombie, is widely rumored to be a pseudonym for Craig Mazin (the mastermind behind The Last of Us and Chernobyl). If Mazin did write this, he clearly didn't use the "good" ink. The dialogue is stuffed with "video game logic" that doesn't translate to the screen, and Jack Black, voicing the robot Claptrap, is forced to deliver jokes that feel like they were focus-grouped by a committee of people who have never actually laughed.

Stuff You Might Not Have Noticed

Despite the chaos, there are a few tiny nuggets for the eagle-eyed.

The film features a cameo from Bobby Lee, who is a recurring face in the Borderlands fan community, playing Larry. Many of the weapons in the background are actual 1:1 replicas of the in-game manufacturers like Tediore and Atlas, showing that the props department at least did their homework. * Ariana Greenblatt, who plays Tiny Tina, actually performed many of her own stunts and managed to capture a bit of the manic energy that the rest of the film sorely lacks.

Ultimately, Borderlands is a victim of its own timing. Released into a post-pandemic market where audiences are increasingly weary of "IP for IP's sake," it failed to justify its existence. It’s not a "so bad it’s good" cult classic in the making; it’s just a shiny, loud distraction that doesn't have the heart to match its neon hair. It’s a film that will likely be remembered primarily as a trivia answer in ten years: "Which movie had two Oscar winners and still lost $80 million?"

If you’re a die-hard fan of the games, you might find some joy in seeing the Psycho masks in live-action. For everyone else, you’re better off just booting up the game and making your own fun. At least there, you get to choose when to stop the dialogue.