Borderlands Movie Review: Cate Blanchett has proven her versatility over the years, but she hasn’t had her Hunger Games or Mad Max yet. With her new film, she tries her hand at the fantasy-action genre, which unfortunately feels more like sleepwalking than child’s play. Although her filmography is filled with gritty dramas, she’s always had the body language of an action star. It’s great to see her wielding guns, jumping around, and showing off that grin, but she deserves a far better vessel to prove her worth on that front.

(Also read – Cannes 2024: Cate Blanchett mocked for calling herself ‘middle class’ despite net worth of $95 million)

It’s a Pandora’s box

Cate plays Lilith, a bounty hunter hired by a wealthy businessman to return to her estranged home of Pandora to retrieve his kidnapped daughter. But when she meets the daughter, she realizes the father is the problem. Along the way, she teams up with unexpected allies, including another gun-toting warrior named Roland (Kevin Hart), a masked Buffy-type named Krom (Olivier Richters), a resourceful scientist named Patricia (Jamie Lee Curtis), and a tiny robot named Claptrap (voice: Jack Black).

The concept of strange bedfellows traveling through a futuristic world makes Borderlands seem eerily similar to Guardians of the Galaxy. But the familiarity disappears as soon as it strikes. The action sequences, while fairly frequent and serviceable, are so uninspired that they lack originality. There are chases, tiptoeing through a tunnel with acid flowing underneath, and navigating a cave full of baddies. But this feels more like going through all the levels of a video game (of course, Borderlands is a video game adaptation) than a journey you take in the flesh.

The unimaginative world-building doesn’t help either. Every threat they face, every weapon they use, every area they traverse feels visually hackneyed and conceptually stale. There isn’t a single piece of fantasy that stuck with me, except for Claptrap shitting bullets out of his asshole. Jack Black tries his best to liven up the script with his witty remarks and exuberant dialogue delivery. He even strikes a kung fu (panda) pose in one action sequence. But the chatter just isn’t enticing enough to make us fall victim and applaud, pun intended. His co-star from Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, Kevin Hart, hardly adds to the fun, although his jamming with Jack during an adventure in this film was so much fun.

Cate deserves better

Jack and Cate managed to create a fantasy world in Eli Roth’s 2018 fantasy comedy A Clockwork Orange. But here they struggle from the start. Even Keerthy Suresh’s Buji is a more worthy techno companion to Prabhas’ Bhairava in Nag Ashwin’s recent dystopian sci-fi epic Kalki 2898 AD. Towards the end of the film, Cate’s character has a dialogue with the villain before making the final move: “I have something you don’t have enough of.” Had Eli and his co-writer Joe Crombie taken up this theme from the start and kept it consistent, Borderlands could have been a more layered film. But unfortunately, like the rest of the film, this dialogue is just chatter.

It could have been an emotional coming-of-age homecoming story, like Ladybird or Causeway, disguised as an action fantasy. But this track feels more forced than organically woven. The cut is clear in the effort two Oscar winners – Cate and Jamie Lee Curtis – put into giving the proceedings emotional weight. But at the end of the day, Borderlands is just a hollow action spectacle, best enjoyed in 4DX, if at all. While we wait with Cate for her definitive action film, we’ll settle for this brief but delicious role as Hela in Thor: Ragnarok. At least that’s a trap worth applauding.