Borderlands Movie Review

 I saw Borderlands over the weekend with my son....it was, well, fine, but the movie clearly has so many weird little issues that it was doomed from the beginning. There's a lot of individual performances and moments that feel very right for Borderlands, but the film is stuck in a pre-Last of Us/pre-Fallout Series quagmire of the sort of lowered expectations Hollywood has had toward video game franchises from the time before someone started doing it right. Still better than the Halo TV show, but that's a super low bar. See if for free and be only slightly disappointed.

Pros on the movie:

--Looks really good for the most part; some nice effort was put in to give the world of Pandora its junky, trashed feel from the games.

--Cate Blanchett really puts it all in on a grizzled older Lilith, who is a gun-toting shoot-first lady version of Han Solo in this film.

--Jack Black really nailed Claptrap the Robot, enough so for me that he almost sounded like the game version.

--Kevin hart does a pretty good Roland circa Borderlands 1. Krieg is Krieg, though if you know him from Borderlands 2 he says a lot of crazy stuff this version in the movie barely touches on. Marcus the gun dealer works surprisingly well given he, like so many Borderlands characters are such distinct visual and audio personalities that that can make it tough for a live actor to live up to the more cartoonish elements of its source material.

And the Cons:

--Made years ago during the pandemic, this project clearly went through too many screen rewrites and edits, and the story is a mashup of bits from the games and "Save the Cat" plot elements jammed in by nervous screenwriters who didn't know what to do with the material and were worried it wouldn't appeal to a mass audience. It ignores or rewrites chunks of game plot in ways that The Last of Us and Fallout Series have shown you do not have to; it is an artifact of the elements of Hollywood that do not like video games and do not know what to do with them.

--The movie has three principle female leads, all in their fifties to sixties. In an action movie about a video game aimed at teens and twenty-somethings, featuring mostly characters also in their teens and twenties. Gina Gershon as Mad Moxxie is arguably the closest in age to her own character, but in the Borderlands universe even Mad Moxxie is still using some unholy biogenetic/cybernetic enhancements to make herself perpetually young looking (maybe, I dunno; its video game logic, okay?) But as I watched this movie all I could think to myself was, "I saw the perfect actress for Lilith earlier this year, and she was playing Furiosa." 

--Even Kevin Hart, despite playing a decent Roland (IMO, YMMV), felt a bit too old for the Roland from the game who I would have pegged at maybe 25-26 years old and fresh out of a tour of duty leading him to vault hunter as a profession. Plus, in the movie, he's actually portrayed as an AWOL crimson lance, which is....maybe what happens to him in a later game? I don't honestly know, I only got about 10 hours in to Borderlands 2 (I've played the first game start to finish 3 times, but never finished 2 or 3, sorry).

--What was with female General Knox (and why gender swap Knox when there was a perfectly workable actual female villain in the original game who filled this exact role?) and her relationship with Roland? Why was that not even remotely developed in a way the audience could see so it had some meaningful payoff? Was that stuff that was filmed and then cut in editing? 

--No skag attack? In a Borderlands game? Yeesh!

--A mishmashed ending which took more from Borderlands 2, but shifted who the characters were and made only a slight nod to the tentacle brother to Cthulhu that is the end boss of the original game. Okay but also not ideal.

--The biggest con with the movie was how remarkably little of it felt "right" and how those moments stood out when the movie did, in fact, occasionally start to feel very much like Borderands, only to then do something that felt ham-fisted and either the result of poor writing or poor editing/direction. 

--The fights lacked pizzazz. The director (Eli Roth, I believe) doesn't seem to know how to do satisfying fight choreography.

--For every region from the game that got an interesting facelift (such as Fyrestone or Piss Wash Gully) there was another location where it was just head-scratching as to why they changed it (the ending sequence, for example, where the Vault entrance is located).  

--Weird and ham-fisted "Save the Cat" plot moments felt jammed in to satisfy story beats or force emotional resonance. The entire backstory of Lilith, Tannis and Lilith's mom was just...unnecessary.

--Tiny Tina was a doomed choice of character from the start; no one was going to top the Animated Tiny Tina for sheer crazy, period.

--Tannis, played by Jamie Lee Curtis is the most out of place of all of the characters. In the game she is a late twenties/early thirties scheming psychopath driven mad by the planet in her pursuit of Eridian artifacts. In the movie she is a seventy-something savant on the spectrum who botched her friend's request to take care of her daughter and who hides away in some attic studying artifacts with no real agency. Curtis does fine, but this just ain't the game's Tannis, by a long shot.

--Why do none of the characters reflect their iconic abilities? How could the movie go at length without showing Lilith use phasing powers, or Roland using his turret machine gun? These were such easy gives for certain scenes, essentially the character's superpowers, and they ignored them. 

--The vibe of the movie is just completely off. It feels at moments like the art and FX team totally got the message, but the writers and director totally did not. Somewhere in this mix someone knew enough to crib material from the game, but not enough to understand the core appeal of the game that could translate to film.

So in short: I give the movie a C for trying, but also a C for somehow failing so badly. I don't regret seeing it, but I also hope the movie is quickly and quietly forgotten so that maybe now, in this post-The Last of Us era of films based on games, we can see a real Borderlands movie done right eventually. I wonder how much cash could be thrown at George Miller to make it? Seriously, he made a much better Borderlands movie earlier this year, called Furiosa.