Borderlands is another video game adaptation that hit theaters, so you know I’d be checking it out. I’ve never played it, much to the chagrin of my gamer friends, so I was able to go in with an untainted mind.

One of the worst things that has ever happened to the film industry is the age rating of 13 and over. It has created too many intermediate levels and too much room for compromise. Films are allowed to stagnate in the area between adult and children’s films. It is not the world that has gone soft, but the people in power. They have become cowards and calculated that they could make more money by putting just enough content in their films to appeal to the older target group without denying children access to cinema tickets.

Bloodless violence and cutesy swearing don’t fit the scenery and environment that the Borderlands planet of Pandora promises. We’re explicitly told we’re in a savage world, but nothing is done to back that up. I talked about movies that have nothing in my review of Man on the Moon a few weeks ago. Borderlands is stuck in that purgatory of being violent but standard, and has no edge, no message, no core.

The beginning is proof of that. It’s a classic adaptation trap, the main character’s explanatory voiceover. It springs from a panic that the audience won’t understand the predetermined world they’re being thrown into, and it only slows down the first act. Instead of introducing us to the story naturally, we’re treated to crap so disgustingly clunky that it somehow becomes both boring and annoying.

It’s a shame how much director Eli Roth misses his world, because it’s beautifully constructed. With the constantly filling frame, it reminds me a little of the Star Wars prequels, where there’s always something to grab the viewer’s attention. The color palette splashes burnt oranges and turquoises across the screen, as well as the ever-present yellow hue of Pandora’s sand, but it seems like post-production toned these down for some bizarre reason. They could have used color correction to turn the cinematography into a neon dreamland—it’s certainly shot with that potential and the production designed around it—but where there could be brightness, shadows or darkness, these are erased.

There’s a quote going around film schools that says 90% of directing is casting. If that’s true, about 80% of this film was completely off. The exceptions would be Jack Black as the one-wheeled robot Claptrap and Florian Munteanu as the rescued psychopath Krieg. Both seemed to understand their roles perfectly and were able to balance sarcastic humor with resignation to the barbarism that surrounds them. The rest, damned nonsense.

Cate Blanchett is incredibly talented, but she would be the last person I would cast to play a callous bounty hunter in a post-apocalyptic desert landscape. It’s such an odd casting, such a square peg in a round hole, that I don’t think anyone, regardless of ability, could play their way out of it. She has to hit a note, because the symphony she’s capable of hitting is silenced by the film.

Jaimie Lee Curtis is stuck in a similar situation. I have no idea what she was trying to accomplish with her character, but she falls far short of her goal. She adopts an accent whose origins are elusive, so I assume she was trying to create her own dialect for the outside world, but she rarely sticks with it. It was like she wanted to be an alien, but she also didn’t want to scare the audience off with something too new. Instead, she decides to do the bare minimum and go from there.

Rounding out the main cast is Kevin Hart as “elite soldier” Roland. Hart has an innate ability to make all of his lines light, acceptable, and pleasantly funny. The downside to this is that he can’t express anything other than simple charm. You’d think his role as a specialized warrior would allow for some fun type-on-type shenanigans, but instead he and Roth choose to play the character seriously.

I really want to defend my boy Roth and say this reeks of studio meddling, and it does, but it still doesn’t excuse a nonsensical script he co-wrote and a third act that raises more questions than it answers. There are a few laugh-out-loud moments and some cool location work, but for the most part it’s banal mismanagement of a prestigious intellectual property.

Critics rating: 4.4/10

Jack Simon is a mogul trainer and writer/director who enjoys eating food he can’t afford, traveling to places beyond his budget, and creating art about skiing, food, and travel despite being broke. Visit his website jacksimonmakes.com to see his travelogue series “Jack’s Jitney.” You can email him at [email protected] for any kind of inquiry.