The Borderlands movie is bad, but I hate it. As a film, it’s aggressively mediocre, as the kids would call it, and at times painfully obnoxious. But it’s easy to see that a lot of money was spent to create an entertaining product for mass audiences. If this was another average Hollywood blockbuster with no soul, no one would care. As a video game adaptation coming out in 2024, however, it’s a severely underdeveloped product.

I can’t call it a movie, though, so let’s use a more appropriate word: “content.” The goodwill that video game adaptations began to gain in the latter half of the last decade could be undone by this film, should it be rewarded with box office success. However, it seems that general audiences don’t like the film either. Do I think it deserves a single-digit overall score on Rotten Tomatoes? No. It’s bad, but not as boring as, say, the Assassin’s Creed film.

Video games have had good, even great adaptations in recent years. But there’s an inherent problem with them when presented as feature-length films. Video games are more naturally suited to long-form storytelling. For every Super Mario Bros. movie, there are a dozen The Last of Us and Arcane projects. When you try to cram a game’s world-building into a two-hour movie, you have to make compromises, and it’s tailored to the casual audience in order to recoup its money. But even with these projects, the creators have appear remembering and sometimes respecting that it’s based on a video game. Even though the plot is paper-thin, they know what tunes to play and what experience to recreate to keep the original fans happy.

My problem with Borderlands has nothing to do with the originals being exactly like that. No amount of accuracy can save a soulless cash-grab like this. My problem is twofold: that it’s not a good movie in and of itself, and that it’s embarrassed about being a video game adaptation.

Here are some things that Borderlands fans love: crazy weapons, lots of loot, and slapstick humor that they proudly display. The Borderlands movie has that last bit, but at the expense of the audience. Jokes that some executives found funny but were met with silence in theaters. What else can we put in the movie to appeal to young gamers? Sex appeal that clashes with the tone of the film. I don’t know whose idea it was to cast Cate Blanchett and Jamie Lee Curtis and have them pose in uncomfortably tight outfits and pretend that their characters are 20-30 years younger than they look, but the result hasn’t satisfied fans of the game or diehard fans of the actors.

During my screening, I joked with a friend that it would be fun to see damage numbers pop up every time someone shoots something. As loud and noisy as that would have been, it would have at least added some snappy personality. The film’s sets are cool, but they fail to sell me on the idea that this is a real planet. Most of the world-building relies on boring voiceovers from Blanchett, who would rather be anywhere else. There are some pretty ambitious ideas for sets that crumble due to either spotty CGI or poorly planned, dated action sequences. It’s a game about crazy guns, right? Maybe they could add a Star Wars-inspired blaster sound effect to some of them? Hell, let Kevin Hart go over the top and do his thing, that would at least make me laugh.

What sets Borderlands apart from most other adaptations is its unwillingness to delve beneath the superficial characterization and a complete tonal mishmash. Every moment of genuine emotion feels artificial, as if the composer was working overtime to squeeze every ounce of pathos out of the cast’s muted or sometimes unearned, over-the-top reactions. If adaptations are meant to increase the value of an intellectual property by luring more people in, then the film failed spectacularly. A 5-minute compilation of the game’s craziest weapons would do a better job of convincing someone to try it out. The film will push them elsewhere, unfortunately. It doesn’t feel good when someone reacts badly to something you love, and I suspect most Borderlands fans will feel that way when they sit in the theater next to those who don’t know the film.

I thought we had left bad video game adaptations like Borderlands behind us. I thought studio executives and producers had learned the right lessons from the genre’s failures. Most seem to have learned that, and we’re entering a golden age of video game adaptations while Hollywood slowly runs out of steam when it comes to digging comics. Let’s hope studios want to deliver a good movie first before dreaming of an entire cinematic universe around it. It remains to be seen how the industry evolves from here, but until then, I’d rather play the existing Borderlands games than be reminded of this pale imitation.

Borderlands is currently in theaters, but you’ll probably have a lot more fun playing the games from the comfort of your own home.