Cate Blanchett (who made this film before TAR and before Roth’s Thanksgiving, so you can imagine how long that film has been gathering dust) plays Lilith, one of the popular Vault Hunters from the video game that made the jump from console to screen. In this version, Lilith is a bounty hunter who is approached one night by associates of the all-powerful Atlas (Edgar Ramirez), who has a well-paying job for the hardened mercenary. When Lilith is convinced of the amount Atlas is willing to pay for the job, I had to laugh because I thought (hoped) that Blanchett also got paid a life-changing sum of money to star in a project so far below her talent level.
The mission is to find Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), Atlas’ daughter, who has been kidnapped by another classic video game character named Roland (Kevin Hart), a soldier gone rogue who escaped to Pandora with the girl and a “psycho” named Krieg (Florian Munteanu). She may be the answer to a legendary treasure trove on Pandora that has spawned an entire industry of treasure hunters trying to find it.
When Lilith returns to her home planet of Pandora, she encounters a robot named Claptrap (voice: Jack Black) who provides some sort of comic relief, which would suggest there is actual comedy in this film. There isn’t. Just endless rambling. Fans of the game will notice some other familiar characters like Moxxi (Gina Gershon) and Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis). According to some released credits, Scooter and Hammerlock also make appearances, but if you blink, you’ll miss them. I must have blinked.
Lilith, Roland, Tannis, Claptrap and Krieg should be an obvious variation on the Guardians of the Galaxy, outcasts on a distant planet who must use their different strengths to save the day as a team, but Roth and Joe Crombie’s script is absolutely not interested in giving them memorable character traits. Blanchett is such a great actress that she sells a little of this defiantly superficial script with a smirk, but Hart looks visibly bored at times, perhaps consumed by the reshoots that led to many delays in this film’s release. On that note, the screenplay for “Borderlands” was once credited to Craig Mazin, the genius behind “Chernobyl” and “The Last of Us,” but he took his name off the film after the reshoots. Usually when a film goes through this much turmoil, you can see where the final product was cobbled together like Frankenstein, but even that game is hard to play here. One can imagine a version of Mazin that put a little more love and care into world-building than this version, but little of that made it into the final version.
