After first contact with fans yesterdaycritics are somehow even more disappointed with the Borderlands movie. They hate it. They don’t even give it the “so bad it’s good” credit. It’s just, by all appearances, a really, really bad movie. As of press time, it has a remarkable 3% approval rating on the Rotten Tomatoes aggregator. Without further improvement, Borderlands will sit comfortably in the middle of RT’s list of the 100 worst movies of all time… and number one on their list of the worst blockbusters of all time – below even 2010’s disastrous The Last Airbender.
Perhaps the best Borderlands Smackdown has been delivered by Rolling Stonewhere critic David Fear called it “an insult to gamers, movie lovers, and carbon-based lifeforms.” Which, in my opinion, is an unnecessarily harsh judgement on the taste of theoretical lifeforms with silicon-oxygen-fluorine biochemistry. You would hate the movie Borderlands too.
“You seriously wonder if the sole purpose of Borderlands is to make every other video game adaptation look a thousand times better by comparison,” Fear says. Later, he says, “It’s clearly a terrible waste of time, talent and pixels. Not even the pleasure of watching Blanchett twirl guns and kick ass can save it.”
On home soil at IGNWhere you’d expect more from a video game movie, Borderlands failed to impress, earning a “terrible” rating from critic Matt Donato, who found that it failed to deliver on any of the games’ promises. The fun locations are there, but they’re “all pre-chewed, familiar, and as filling as a single rice cake.”
Even diversity couldn’t find anything lovable: “When Borderlands opens its vault, not even the characters seem to care what’s inside,” said Peter Debruge.
However, for me the best summary of the critics’ views comes from The Wrap by author William Bibbiani. Bibbiani’s review notes how much Borderlands tries and fails to be like other, better films, rather than finding its own voice derived from the games.
“The biggest problem with Eli Roth’s Borderlands is not that it’s bad,” says Bibbiani, “but that it’s not interesting enough to be bad. It’s mass-produced mush. All the edges have been sanded off so it can be safe and mainstream, but they’ve gone too far and there’s almost nothing left. Technically, it’s a movie based on Borderlands. Not much more than that.”
We’ll see if Borderlands’ box office numbers live up to its expectations, but I think we’re all assuming it won’t take off there either.
