I don't think there are very many video game to screen films out there. In fact, I can only think of a couple that are even passable as entertainment and for the most part they fall flat. Hollywood keeps making them because they are an almost guaranteed money-maker in most situations and that is why we have a bunch of Resident Evil movies even though none of them are particularly good. Don't get me started on the disaster that was the RE series that was thankfully cancelled.
When Borderlands was released I remember seeing the almost immediate negativity coming from all angles about this big-budget movie and for a while there I thought that at least some of it might be coming from the fact that Jack Black is so outspoken politically. I was never going to see this in theaters but the other day it popped up on my Plex and I had nothing else to do and figured I would give it a shot.
I honestly gave it a fair shake and didn't allow any of the reviews I have read affect my opinion of it but dear lord, this thing really is at least as bad as the negative reviews would indicate.
I'm not really a devoted gamer. I own a couple of last gen systems and did play one of the Borderlands games. I have pretty fond memories of the mixture of humor with ruthless gameplay and was assuming they would do the same thing with this especially because Kevin Hart is in it. I was expecting it to be pushing towards humor with a bit of some pretty vicious action in it but somehow they managed to screw that up.
I was surprised to hear that Cate Blachett and Jamie Lee Curtis signed on to this because both of them are rather accomplished actresses. Well, I suppose Cate is significantly more respected in this realm but the point remains: This is NOT their usual cuppa. I thought that Cate would be able to pull it off more than Curtis and for the most part this is correct. Curtis is abyssmal in this movie and her portrayal of whatever-the-hell her character's name was is was wooden, aloof, and out of sorts the entire time. It seemed as though she couldn't figure out what to do with the character. That being said this is also true of literally everyone else in the cast other than perhaps relative newcomer Ariana Greenblatt, who did a pretty spot on portrayal of Tina Tina and she perfectly represented how I think a Borderlands character should be.
Tiny Tina is over the top, ridiculous and impractical and this really falls in line with what I would imagine most fans of the game would expect. Unfortunately, Greenblatt is surrounded by actors and actresses that are out of their element and it doesn't help that it appears that none of them really took the production seriously and basically phoned in their performances. Combine this with a nonsensical plot progression and surprisingly poor CGI, and you have a mess of a film that barely manages to remain entertaining. It is more annoying than anything else and this is only made worse by Jack Black's loud and excruciatingly awful voice-work of Claptrap.
To be as fair to Jack Black as I can be, Claptrap is supposed to be annoying just like he was in the game that I recall playing. I don't actually recall a great deal of the game but I remember that so perhaps Jack did a good job with a bad script.
The problems with this film are too numerous to list here but in a shell, the plot is absurd and unnecessary and the obvious conclusion of the good guys winning is something that is expected. I had hoped that the action would be a LOT better than it was though and especially with Cate, the action scenes don't even look good. It appears as though they threw a bunch of money at her and she agreed to sign on but then didn't even do the choreography practice properly and this necessitated a lot of body double work as well as creative camera use.
With such a cast and the backing of one of the most popular games of all time, one would assume that this would have been a labor of love for the CGI department if nothing else, yet almost all of that looks cheap and even unfinished despite the estimated $120 million budget.
Furthermore, in what I can only presume was an effort to bring the rating down to PG-13 to make this marketable to children, there is zero blood in this film despite hundreds of kills. This is something that I have never understood about rating systems: The people or creatures are clearly getting their lives ended, but if we don't show any blood it is somehow "safer" for children?
The horrible CGI is inexcusable, even with everything else about this movie already being bad. For example, the above action sequence where Lilith was rolling over a barricade while firing at enemies is something that they used a great deal in their promotional materials but even when it was slowed down I guess as much as they could do, it doesn't even appear to be Cate in the sequence. I would imagine that her big ego necessitated her not facing any possibility of her getting hurt and she simply lied down for a still of this and the rest of it had to be done by stunt doubles.
Say what you will about the Rock and people like Keanu Reeves, but when they take on an action film they are prepared to put in the homework and perform a great deal of the action on their own. Cate doesn't appear to actually even be there for a lot of this and it was later revealed that for many of the group shots she actually really wasn't there and had to be added in with editing. I suppose I can't blame her. Imagine the roasting her agent got after the fact. She is an Academy Award winning actress and she signs up for this drivel? Mistake!
Should I watch it?
I think it should be clear based on what I wrote above and from what you have likely heard from other sources already in that if there was a 2024 movie that you should definitely skip, this is it. This movie has almost no redeeming qualities. It isn't funny, it isn't exciting, there are no twists other than one and when that happens you don't care because you just want it to be over. This isn't a movie with a coherent plot, it is a collection of scenes that don't really fit together at all. This is just a series of absurd and not even terribly related action sequences crammed together to fill up 90 minutes.
I am always reluctant to believe official critics when they all gang up on something and say it is bad and sometimes this encourages me to go out and prove them wrong. In this situation I cannot find any fault in the negative criticism that this movie has almost universally received. It really is as bad, if not worse, than everything that you have heard already.
if you insist on watching this disaster of a movie you can do so legally on AppleTV+ and almost any other pay-per-view service. It will likely be available for streaming on Peacock or some other up-and-coming streaming service soon if it isn't there already. I don't care enough to look. I strongly encourage you to spend your time doing almost anything else though, perhaps play the games?
