Yet another video game movie that is a pile of butt release.
“Borderlands” is based off a video game, and looks like if “Mad Max” and “Guardians of the Galaxy” had a ménage à trois with either “The Adventures of Pluto Nash” or “Battlefield Earth.” I can’t tell which one it is, but the results are pretty messy.
The main planet is Pandora (how original), which is and always was a desolate wasteland. But maybe a special artifact can change it. Or maybe I was missing something. Don’t know, don’t care.
Here are the main heroes of “Borderlands.”
There’s the bounty hunter Lilith (Cate Blanchett), who is assigned to find the daughter of the film’s bad guy Atlas (Edgar Ramirez). She has a dyed red-orange hairstyle like she’s trying to look like a bad ass, and relies on guns and violence for her introduction.
There’s also the mercenary Roland (Kevin Hart), who rescued the girl, and thinks he can act like her father to avoid the bad guys. Another Hart movie this year when he tries to act so serious after “Lift.”
That girl happens to be Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), who wears rabbit ears almost like Louise on “Bob’s Burgers,” and makes bombs out of stuffed animals. She’s also an idiot when they drive through an environment called “Piss Wash,” and she rolls down the car window and refuses to close it, and therefore, she gets urine in her mouth. It’s quite degrading considering the fact that she played America Ferrera’s daughter who told the Will Ferrell CEO that Barbie ending up with Ken is not supposed to be her happy ending in “Barbie.”
She’s also has her muscle Krieg (Florian Munteanu), who wears a mask and orange pants, and thinks that shouting will make him tougher. It doesn’t. It makes him sound stupid. An aggravatingly lame version of Rocket and Groot, no more and no less.
Next up, Claptrap (voiced by Jack Black), a robot, who looks like a rejected version of Wall-E trying to mimic John Candy’s voice of the robot from the “So Beautiful and So Dangerous” segment in “Heavy Metal.” When Black sings “Scanning, Scanning, Scanning,” it’s pretty funny the way he says it, but everything else from him is just exhausting. And who said him crapping out lead is comedy gold?
And finally, we have the scientist Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), who has her issues with Lilith. You bet she does. She won the Oscar for “Everything Everywhere All At Once.” She might win a Razzie for this movie. Or maybe it’ll be Blanchett or Greenblatt. We shall see.
“Borderlands” is just as bad as we all anticipated, whether or not we’re fans of the game, and I’ve never played the game, so I knew it would be bad, too. What’s even more disjointed is the fact that it’s directed by Eli Roth, who surprised me quite well with his horror film “Thanksgiving.” If “Tropic Thunder” had a sequel and “Borderlands” was a fake trailer, and there was a universe where it actually became a movie, the math speaks for itself.
Blanchett is a fine actress, Hart is flexible, Black is cool, Greenblatt is a good child actress, and Curtis is a legend, but the same can’t be said for their performances here. They’re all suffering from a story that makes no sense, a visual world as dismal as the trailers make it to be, and its poor blending of action and comedy. And when it tries to be serious, you still don’t care.
Afterwards, a friend of mine asked me what movie I saw, and I told him so far, I saw “Didi” and “Borderlands.” And he was more interested in what “Didi” was, indicating that he’s smarter than the other movie thinks he is. Back to “Deadpool & Wolverine” and “Twisters,” people.
