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Video game adaptations have always had a bad rap, but at least in relatively recent memory, things have felt like they’ve turned the corner. At the box office we’ve had decent, if not amazing, family movies like the Sonic series, Illumination’s Super Mario Bros. movie, and Detective Pikachu, while streaming has given us a veritable boon of killer game adaptations, like Arcane, The Last of Us, and Castlevania. But perhaps much like the humor of its source material, the Borderlands movie is back to remind us with a plodding thunk of just how bad things used to be.
Reviews for Eli Roth’s adaptation of the iconic Gearbox sci-fi shooter series have come pouring in today ahead of the film’s opening this week—with Borderlands sitting at just 3% on Rotten Tomatoes as of writing. So, how bad is the film? The answer, it turns out, is “extremely.”
“The biggest problem with Eli Roth’s Borderlands isn’t that it’s bad, it’s that it’s not interesting enough to be bad. It’s mass-produced pabulum,” writes William Bibbiani for The Wrap. “All the edges have been sanded down so it can be safe and mainstream, but they went too far and there’s almost nothing left. It’s technically a movie based on Borderlands. Not much else.”
“The hyper-stylized flair of the Borderlands games is replicated only on the most superficial level, and with a PG-13 rating, all the limb-severing gore, dirty-minded humor, and uniquely deranged themes are replaced by recycled blandness geared toward mass marketability,” adds IGN’s Matt Donato. “It’s the worst-case-scenario Borderlands movie that goes against everything Borderlands stands for as a series–a miserable failure.”
“It’s conceivable that longtime fans of the video game might get more out of Borderlands, but I wouldn’t count on it,” concludes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney. “At one point, Claptrap returns to operational mode after a heavy-weaponry assault and says, ‘I blacked out. Did something important happen?’ Not in this movie.”
Even amid the biting put-downs and an oddly stacked, albeit apparently wasted cast—which includes the likes of Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, and Ariana Greenblatt—one thing reviewers can agree on other than Borderlands‘ distinct lack of quality is that at least noted garden chainsaw enthusiast Cate Blanchett has a decent time as the film’s main character, the psionic bounty hunter Lilith. In fact, the theme of most reviews so far seems to be befuddlement that Blanchett even signed up for the film in the first place.
“Blanchett appears to enjoy striding around in slinky leatherwear with holsters strapped across her hips ready for some lightning-fast gunslinging,” Rooney’s review continues. “But the role is thinly drawn, cut from a familiar template of tough, cynical, cool-headed female action figures. Any hope for more of the campy authority Blanchett brought to Thor: Ragnarok goes unrewarded.”
“Blanchett barely tries to embody her protagonist as a three-dimensional human being,” says Daily Beast’s Nick Shager. “And while that’s wise (since the script makes such an endeavor impossible), her cooler-than-cool posturing is painfully affected and unconvincing, as are her faux-badass wisecracks and threats.”
“The chance [for Blanchett] to channel her inner Clint Eastwood probably played a part as well. Maybe she simply wanted to do the action-hero thing in a VFX-filled potential franchise-starter,” muses David Fear for Rolling Stone. “What we want is a time machine, which would allow us to travel back to the moment Ms. Blanchett first picked up the “script” for this unholy disaster and plead: Don’t do it.”
Perhaps then, not even Blanchett can save us from a return to the gaming adaptation dark ages. “Go play the Borderlands shooters. Go watch six-hour gameplay videos of it on YouTube. Go get several chlamydia tests back to back. Every one of those options are far more useful and far, far less painful than this,” Fear concludes. Ouch.
Borderlands hits theaters tomorrow, August 9. If you dare, apparently.
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