The Borderland Movie adaptations are hitting theaters today, closely followed by the flood of video game adaptations that have flooded television and cinema in recent years.

From Nintendo’s billion-dollar animation project The Super Mario Bros. Movie last year to the upcoming Sonic the Hedgehog triquel, video game adaptations are big business and they appear to get better.

Amazon Prime Video Stand out Adaptation became the second biggest show of all time on the platform, while The last of us is undoubtedly one of HBO’s best series and fans are eagerly awaiting the second season even after the games.

Sure, longer runtimes certainly make it easier to build the world, develop characters, and even add more Easter eggs, but more is not always better, and in fact Borderland The running time is just under 100 minutes. A rare treat in modern cinema.

The problem with Borderland is that while it’s an incredibly faithful adaptation visually, with hilarious pinpricks and a megawatt comedic cast, it’s just not funny enough, it’s not crazy enough, and it’s not even particularly brutal enough. It’s kind of boring.

Borderland falls into the middle range of “blah,” where it can be placed alongside other releases on our metaphorical video game-movie comparison shelf, such as 2018’s Grave robbers2020s Monster Hunter and 2022 Uncharted.

The film follows the main plot lines and features exterminators who land on Pandora, an alien planet, searching for magical keys to open a mystical chamber containing untold powers and treasure. To do so, a ragtag group of misfits must band together to find the daughter of the most powerful man in the universe.

Fans of the games will enjoy the perfect rendition of Claptrap, featuring the hilarious voice of video game and film veteran Jack Black.

Still, the role feels like a missed opportunity for Black to improvise and let loose with dialogue or shine through some of the passionate vocal acrobatics that made Bowser so compelling and “Peaches” such a bad mom jam.

Plus, there are just too many stoic and heroic characters doing the same thing, which is made all the more odd when you have such comedic powerhouses as Kevin Hart (who plays Private Roland) and Jamie Lee Curtis as the nervous Dr. Patrica Tannis.

Hart’s 5’5″ stature, so often the punch line in his films, is mentioned once before he falls into the archetype of a bland hero. Aside from a light-hearted moment with Bobby Lee’s Larry in a bar, he gets little chance to let his natural charisma shine, which again seems like a waste of his talent.

Some hilarity comes from Ariana Greenblatt as lost, chaotic teenager Tiny Tina, who befriends Florian Munteanu’s nearly mute psychopath Krieg. Surprisingly, Krieg has some of the best lines while bizarrely barking out sudden answers in the background.

Rounding out the cast is Cate Beckinsale’s Lilith, who looks incredible. Her hair is a gravitational wonder and the costume looks like a fantastic interpretation of the game, with even little hints of the cel-shading style that made the games so visually unique.

Prime Video Stand out managed to create an incredibly fine line between emotional seriousness and surreal horror humor that perfectly captured Bethesda’s wasteland. And it feels like Borderland could have easily focused more on the humor, perhaps the film could have been approached in a similar way to the Dungeons and Dragons Restart or the Protector of the Galaxy Series in which deliberately silly jokes drive the silly action forward.

The film is rated 12A, even though the games are generally more adult, with foul language, violence, drugs and blood. There is hardly any foul language here, nor is there any blood splatter, even though LOTS of people get shot. This again feels like a missed opportunity for acclaimed horror director Eli Roth.

There’s a moment where Tiny Tina silently breaks the neck of a psychopath at the edge of the screen, which quickly makes you feel like the film has been cut for a lower age rating.

Would more blood, sex and violence make the film better? No, of course not. But it does raise the question of whether more could have been made of it if things had been made a little more intense.

Borderland feels like a kids’ movie, but even if that’s the case, it doesn’t excuse the lack of humor and engaging characters, and those shortcomings can’t be made up for by the strong visual effects.

There are some great moments, but the quality drops at times because the CGI is shaky and there’s a distinct sense of budget constraints, which means the full extent of the intergalactic neon-apocalyptic world isn’t portrayed.

As a fan of the Borderland The games didn’t add much depth to the experience, it felt more like checking these elements off on screen, with cameo appearances from Mad Moxxi (Gina Gershon) and Marcus (Benjamin Byron Davis).

Ideally, video adaptations delight existing fans while simultaneously translating the magic of the game into a film medium for newcomers to help them understand what makes the games so special. Borderland feels like it could would have been incredibly bombastic fun. Instead, it’s more of a laborious march through a noisy desert with a few cosplayers.

Borderland now in its cinemas.