Even by video game movie standards, Borderlands is an all-time disaster

When I was a young girl, my father took me into the city to see a marching band. He said "daughter, when you grow up, would you be the savior of the broken, the beaten, and the damned?" Solemnly, he gazed towards the sky and then reaffirmed to me his mortality. "One day, I'll leave you, a phantom, to lead you in the summer, to join the black parade." After that, we watched the parade largely in silence, save for my father occasionally murmuring to himself "just a man, I'm not a hero."

I still don't know why my father, Gerard Way Laman, got so existential watching horses trot by at the annual Dallas Days parade. But his words stirred something deep in my soul. From that day forward, I would use every ounce of my energy to stump for “the broken, the beaten, and the damned.” Alas, today I have failed an exception. The movie Borderlands is “broken”. It’s “beaten”, especially in its clumsy editing. “Damned” is the friendliest word you can afford for this woe begotten feature. Yet I cannot be its savior. Nobody could fulfill that role for a film this bad. Instead of reminding me to live up to my father’s fateful words at that parade, Borderlands evoked another phrase my father was fond of… “come one, come all, to this tragic affair…”

Director Eli Roth's Borderlands script (which he penned with Joe Crombie along with countless uncredited writers) begins with ham-fisted narration from scheming bounty hunter Lilith (Cate Blanchett). The wealthy Atlas (Edgar Ramirez) conscripts her to retrieve his daughter Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) on the treacherous planet Pandora. When she arrives, she discovers Tina is living with soldier Roland (Kevin Hart) and the musclebound Krieg (Floria Munteanu). A slew of confusing double-crosses eventually put Lillith on the same team as her adolescent target. Now everyone, including chatterbox robot Claptrap (Jack Black), are hunting for The Vault, a mystical chamber of alien artifacts located somewhere on Pandora.

Though based on a video game series, Borderlands is most evocative of what an R-rated movie would look like on kids-oriented programs like Arthur or Hey Arnold. If you wanted a TV-Y7 show to depict a "mature" movie without actually being graphic, Borderlands would fit the bill. All the violence is sterile and bloodless. “Poopyhead” is treated as especially profane verbiage. Every character's drawn in incredibly arch terms. These elements would function fine for an “adult” movie glimpsed super briefly in a Chowder or Camp Lazlo episode. As a 100-minute theatrical release in 2024, it’s excruciating to experience.

Borderlands is a movie without a pulse or creative objection. Several elements, like the meta-opening narration or Pandora's supposedly “chaotic” nature, suggest this feature yearns to get its anarchic freak on. This is already a problem since Roth’s idea of “provocative” seems rooted in late 2000’s internet culture. Tina’s army of explosive cutesy stuffed animals recalls nothing more than Happy Tree Friends. That same character’s various “wacky” phrases, like how she describes how unhinged her father is, would've been right at home in snarky 2008 social media posts.

Then there’s Dr. Patricia Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis). With lines like "I can tell by your body language you're angry" or "I'm finally feeling emotion", not to mention gags about her being oblivious to the needs of other characters, Tannis is clearly evoking stereotypical (and harmful) pop culture portrayals of autism. She's a Sheldon Cooper clone arriving 17 years after The Big Bang Theory began airing. Were these discernibly late-2000s comedic elements supposed to evoke the year (2009) when the first Borderlands video game came out? Or, more likely, is it just a product of incredibly lazy screenwriting? With stale gags and cultural influences informing its script, Borderlands never comes close to evoking true anarchy. You can’t posit your band as akin to The Dead Kennedys and sing Imagine Dragons lyrics.  

Once the third act rolls around, Borderlands hits a new creative low through executing unearned schmaltz and predictable character resolutions with zero panache. Shamelessly derivative sequences cribbing from vastly superior movies like Kung Fu Panda 2 or Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 fill the screen. Such uninspired material caps off character arcs that barely existed up to this point. The incompetence is staggering. Borderlands works as neither edgelord cinema nor mainstream fluff. Its only accomplishment is maybe putting some moviegoers to sleep.

All those deficits mean those coming to Borderlands for the bare minimum surface-level summer blockbuster pleasures will leave gravely disappointed. Hideous editing, presumably cutting around gorier bits that wouldn’t make it into a PG-13 movie, leaves the action sequences a blur. Anyone expecting the creative kills defining Roth’s earlier works (like THAT trampoline scene in the Thanksgiving parody trailer), leave those expectations at the door. Borderlands makes explosions, Cate Blanchett welding guns, and Gina Gershon as a brothel owner boring.

Instead of fun action, Borderlands settles for noise. Endless noise. Every second is crammed with hastily ADR’d jokes, most coming from Claptrap. If you’re a demented soul who yearned for Jack Black to deliver non-stop quips in an Orko/Fuzzbucket voice, your patience has been rewarded. For the rest of the population. Claptrap’s loud relentless witticisms will register as tiresome. A quiet moment can’t exist without Claptrap delivering verbose jests designed in a lab to give people headaches. I don’t know what was going through the brains of the Borderlands creative team, but Claptrap flirting with a vending machine with the phrase “hey, sugar chips!” is not as endearing as Rocket Raccoon’s schtick in Guardians of the Galaxy.

Criminally misusing Black is the most egregious casting snafu in Borderlands. However, it’s far from the only instance of mismatched actors in this cinema calamity. The sharpest lives in the acting realm are wasted here…and Kevin Hart, he’s also squandered a bit. That Ride Along veteran's insultingly miscast playing a “serious” soldier. He proves ill-equipped to handle a tough guy persona. Edgar Ramirez exudes no distinctive personality in yet another one of his thankless American blockbuster villain roles. As for leading lady Cate Blanchett, she occasionally registers a fun rambunctious spark in his performance. Thankfully, the Borderlands script quickly extinguishes any trace of anarchy in her character. Lillith instead becomes a surrogate mother figure to Tina. Only parenting skills can define women characters, of course.

Despite the urgings of my father, I cannot give a cheer to the broken in the case of Borderlands. This exceedingly amateurishly produced production stands out in its incompetence even in the dismal video game movie realm. Its shortcomings show an incredible lack of respect for moviegoers or creativity itself. The world has not taken my heart, but Borderlands did take 104 minutes of my life. Even with that reality, Borderlands didn't break me. Movie geeks like me, we'll carry on. As Gerard Way Laman implored me eons ago, I will play this part (of someone wielding a passion for cinema), I want it all...except for movies as historically bad as Borderlands. Something like this can stay in the very very back of the Black Parade.