End of 2022 tarCate Blanchett’s title character, given name Lydia, is at the lowest point of her career, shamed and shunned because of her abusive past. She has lost everything in her life, her marriage and her career both imploding simultaneously. The film ends with the conductor preparing for what appears to be a comeback performance, a redemption arc in which the tortured genius is given one more chance, before ending with a very funny and very cruel joke: the performance is the video game soundtrack for Monster Hunterand this conductor who once led an orchestra with an iron fist in front of the richest people in the world is now dependent on making a dollar in front of cosplayers.
I thought about the end of tar a lot of watching Borderland. Cate Blanchett isn’t at the lowest point in her career, but it certainly felt like it. Why else would a multiple Oscar winner sign on to something as heinous as this film if not for lack of better alternatives?
For those who don’t know: Borderland is an adaptation of the video game series of the same name, a “looter shooter” (meaning the thrill comes from getting new loot, particularly weapons that can radically change gameplay; one weapon might fire rockets from a pistol while another might track enemies, making aiming less important) whose main trademark was its edgy humor. By “edgy,” I mean “stuck in the late 2000s Reddit Epic Bacon mindset, sir!” I have to admit, I enjoyed playing the three main lines Borderland games, mainly because of their good cooperative gameplay and definitely not because they were so fun.
Because they really weren’t. Even in 2009, when the first game came out, the humor seemed dated, a lot of nonsense and obvious stereotypes, some of which were significantly more offensive than others. So what does a Borderland film will be set in 2024, when humor is almost old enough to drive? The answer, in the incompetent hands of director Eli Roth, is somehow worse than the games that inspired it.
Film critics and general film lovers get a lot of benefit from criticizing (mostly rightly) Marvel films for foregoing real jokes and instead saying, “Well, The just happened!” he jokes. Now that I have seen Borderlandthis feels like an indefensible insult to superhero movies. There’s nothing to laugh at in this particular wasteland, and even the most obvious lines aren’t filled with joy, as all the characters refer back to what just happened in a monotone voice, which is meant to give the impression that everyone is too old for this shit. (Blanchett’s character Lilith actually says “I’m getting too old for this shit” in an early scene.)
The plot isn’t much better than the dialogue. I borrowed and remixed the main story elements from the first two games in the series, as far as I can remember. Borderland a ragtag family tries to find various keys to a vault that supposedly contains alien artifacts that make whoever opens it the most powerful being in the universe. Or something like that. I’m not really sure, because the film never explains what these artifacts can actually do, even when they are revealed in the climax. Really, this is just an adventure film, and that can be fine with undefined stakes, but there’s no urgency here. There’s an evil corporation trying to access the vault, and some family drama to add some pathos that it doesn’t need, but every character in the film does their duty, as do the actors portraying them.
Borderland Blanchett wastes her by giving her absolutely nothing to work with. She does her best, I guess, but even her best can’t elevate Lilith above the standard character type of lone outlaw, and she’s constantly grinning at nothing in particular. Almost no one else in the cast comes across as remotely respectable. Jamie Lee Curtis, as a mad scientist whose madness basically boils down to her being “a little quirky,” further gambles away the reputation her failed Oscar might have earned her. Venezuelan actor Édgar Ramírez plays the villain Atlas, mostly in hologram scenes, and if someone told me he shot it all in an afternoon, I’d believe it. Ariana Greenblatt takes her Barbie character and makes him about 70 percent more inscrutable and irritating, while at least fortunately leaving out (most) of the racist voices Borderland Character Tiny Tina was well-known in the games. Jack Black voices Claptrap, a robot whose humor is rooted solely in how cute and WALL-E-like he looks in contrast to the PG-13 swear words he uses. Only Creed II Villain Florian Munteanu comes out of it with his dignity intact: his “war” at least makes use of the actor’s physicality, and although he plays a cliché – the gentle giant – he at least manages to demonstrate an impressive understanding of how stupid this film is.
And, my God, Kevin Hart. I may have a lot of criticisms of Hart as an actor, but one thing I never thought I’d say about him is that he gives a completely botched performance. The man is known for giving his all to even the crappiest material, for better or for worse, but his Roland is portrayed as a serious man, and it’s clear from essentially the first scene of the film that his heart isn’t in it. By my count, he gets one shot at a laugh, and it’s a bust: After fighting a bunch of crazy gang members and ending up under a pile of bodies, he digs his way out and says, “The worst. Orgy. Ever.” That’s the kind of humor we’re working with here. If there had been a laugh track, it might have been more interesting because of the surreality.
Please don’t misunderstand me: If the above gives the impression that Borderland could be fun in a train-wreck kind of way, but I’d be doing everyone a disservice if I didn’t explicitly say this: It’s not. It’s a boring money-making scheme with no money to be made. I know there’s an audience for almost anything, but I can’t imagine what audience there is for an ugly, CGI-laden trash movie like this. Fans of the video games might get a little kick out of seeing their favorites on the big screen, but other than a few references to gun names, there’s nothing that could serve as fan service. Action movie fans will have exactly one somewhat entertaining scene to watch, a frenetic if hard-to-follow underground fight set to Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades.” The rest of the action is either stilted or boring, with the big climax scene culminating in watching Ramírez repeatedly cock his arm to fire a laser beam from a spaceship.
Back to the PG-13 rating for a moment: If there was one way to save this film, it would have been to give Roth free rein. Roth is no one’s idea of a good director, but he seems to have understood, at least in general, that his value proposition is based on unbridled gore. (I have seen hostel And Hostel III know what I’m talking about.) But there is nothing of that here, because Borderland operates within an age rating that is undoubtedly aimed at children whose sense of humor has not yet matured beyond poop jokes. I don’t recall seeing any blood, there are no sick and twisted murders, there is nothing to even grimace about – because there is nothing here.
Instead, Roth is forced to act like a normal director with normal talents he doesn’t possess. The action scenes are shot in a way that suggests a strategy: make everything look as stylish as possible and hope no one notices how repetitive that action is. The action and dialogue scenes are even worse, with close-ups under artificial lighting that give everything a soundstage atmosphere that sometimes made me think these actors had never been in the same room. I’m tempted to at least give Roth credit for avoiding a first-person scene like Downfall‘s, but that would have been interesting at least.
Borderland is a complete failure because every decision made in its creation is hostile to the idea of intrigue. You can criticize the games all you want, but at least they were fun to play in their own way. The movie, however, fails to replicate the only good parts of the games, and so all that’s left is sleepwalking through moves that aren’t good to begin with. I’m not here to say there’s a better movie. Borderland film; this was a doomed venture from the beginning, because what Borderland was best as a video game—Gameplay– is irrelevant for the film adaptation.
This disaster could only have been avoided if someone, somewhere, had realized what a piece of crap the original was and how little there was to be gained from the idea of a Mad Max aesthetic combined with teenage sensibilities. The result, it turns out, is somehow worse than the description in the introduction suggests. Borderland is only notable because it combines everyone’s worst impulses and launches an attack on anyone unlucky or stupid enough to listen to it.
