Borderlands

Lilith, a loner bounty hunter, is tasked with saving a kidnapped girl only to discover that she’s a pawn in the evil machinations of corporate greed.

Borderlands Review

Thanks to fun and bouncy movies like The Super Mario Bros. Movie and quirky series like Fallout fresh in their collective memory, audiences have quickly forgotten just how bad video game film adaptations can be. After all, travesties like 2005’s BloodRayne or the Jean-Claude Van damn-what-did-I-just-watch Street Fighter are ancient history, right?  Fortunately, the folks responsible for Borderlands were kind enough to remind us of our recent privilege.

Benefitting from detailed and quality set and costume designs, as well as execution, Borderlands fails at everything else. Not even its Academy Award-winning actresses can vomit up its trite and uninspired dialogue without looking like little more than talented college performers. However, the film’s ineptitude is most exquisitely exemplified in its meaningless adventure.

Borderlands is a test case in MacGuffins and convenience. Need to find something important? No problem; the unassailable lead will “get a feeling” just in time to find it before lucking her way out of certain death. Even for a film inspired by a game series best known for its silly sense of humor and first-person shooting, one might expect that a video game movie would be able to handle something as simple and as standard as a fetch quest or that it might understand basic adventure principles. Instead, the film is moved along by literal buses that show up just in time to move key characters to key locations filled with helpful characters who know key bits of information, not to mention characters physically stumbling over plot devices.

“But James,” you say, “we’re not expecting much from this film. Surely, it provides some dumb fun and enjoyable characters meshing together in a charismatic ensemble.” It does not. Borderlands is the flat and expired can of Shasta Cola of ragtag ensemble space adventures. What comic relief there is has been recycled more than airplane cabin air, and none of the 1-dimensional characters give us sufficient reason to care about what happens to them from one moment to the next. Halfway through the film, I forgot that Kevin Hart was even in it, only to be reminded by his sudden reappearance at the end.

Perhaps, were its plot “twist” not as obvious as your great aunt’s hairy goiter, the movie would have something worthwhile to offer. However, without a single interesting character or original thought and a charmless ensemble with the chemistry of rust, Borderlands is Atari’s ET of video game movies.

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