From left, Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu and Jamie Lee Curtis star in Borderlands.Katalin Vermes/The Associated Press
Borderlands
Directed by Eli Roth
Written by Eli Roth and Joe Crombie
Starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart and the voice of Jack Black
Classification PG; 102 minutes
Opens in theatres Aug. 9
In the final scene of Todd Field’s masterful 2022 film Tár, Cate Blanchett’s title character – a world-renowned composer whose career has been upended by revelations of her abusive behaviour – secures a last-resort gig for her most disdained audience: video-game nerds. The moment is a perfectly sour stinger, but has also turned out to be backwards-prescient, too. Just a few years after Tár marked a high point in Blanchett’s filmography, along comes the limp video-game adaptation Borderlands to mark a distressingly nerdy low.
The trouble with Borderlands can be first spotted right in its production notes. Initially shot back in the spring of 2021, director Eli Roth’s film took three long years to make it to the screen. (For added injury, it was filmed several months before Tár, which opened almost two years ago.) But it is hard to imagine that any amount of time – shorter or longer – would have helped Borderlands become borderline entertaining.
Tonally messy, narratively janky and slathered with pasted-over narration that reeks of creative indecision, the film is an embarrassing affair for even the most hardcore of gamers, who already have no shortage of indifferently produced video-game adaptations to contend with. The only good news: The movie is so instantly forgettable that it will likely linger in Blanchett’s own memory, a cautionary tale of hasty pandemic-era decision-making.
It might be unfair to single out Blanchett, given that she seems more committed than almost any of her co-stars, each of whom linger around the edges of scenes with the impatience of someone waiting years to cash a cheque. But even the most adventurous and/or desperate performer would have a difficult time playing the role Blanchett is assigned here. As Lilith, an orange-wigged intergalactic bounty hunter ripped straight out of the Han Solo playbook, Blanchett must somehow persuade audiences to become invested in the sloppiest of sci-fi stories. Something about an ancient alien prophecy, buried treasure and a wasteland planet named Pandora (no, not the Avatar home world, sadly).
Along for the bumpy ride is the most eclectically collected supporting cast of Blanchett’s career: Kevin Hart as a do-gooding mercenary, Jamie Lee Curtis as a scientist of dubious allegiances, Florian Munteanu as a masked brute, Edgar Ramirez as an evil intergalactic tech mogul and Jack Black as the voice of a Wall-E-like robot named Claptrap who very quickly wears out his welcome.
With the exception of Ariana Greenblatt, a charming young actress who plays this movie’s equivalent of a human MacGuffin, everyone is brutally miscast. Hart struggles in his straight-man role, Munteanu cannot project any personality beyond his various bulges, and I swear that Ramirez – so mistreated by Hollywood since his days leading Olivier Assayas’s fantastic epic Carlos – seems to actually doze off several times on-screen.
The marketing for Borderlands might be trying to sell a cheaper, dirtier version of Guardians of the Galaxy – a quirky band of misfits saving the universe, all sound-tracked by classic-rock tunes – but this makes even Marvel’s worst effort seem like a five-star affair. And don’t be fooled by the presence of Electric Light Orchestra on those trailers, either – this film is completely free of such fun jukebox jams.
Roth likely deserves much of the blame, though the film is so relentlessly middling that it feels curiously divorced from his typically extreme sensibilities. Love him or hate him, Roth has a track record of at the very least going for it. Some audiences might not be able to stomach such Roth outings as Thanksgiving, The Green Inferno and the Hostel films, but there is no doubt that there is a singular, sick appetite serving up those dishes. Borderlands, on the other hand, is so bland it makes you long for any kind of distaste.
In that way, Borderlands is perhaps closer to Roth’s work on the pointless 2018 remake of Death Wish – there is nothing going on here other than an opportunity to mint some easy intellectual-property money. Not even Lydia Tár would stoop so low.