Borderlands Review

Video games are the hot new IP in the world of filmmaking, with recent hits like the Sonic the Hedgehog films, The Super Mario Bros Movie and The Last of Us impressing both audiences and critics, while bringing some serious coin for their respective studios, we can expect a slew of adaptations heading our way on the small and big screen and now the latest from 2K games based on the game series Borderlands. The three main games are a bloody and riotious romp that fall into the looter shooter category, they are a lot of fun with rich storytelling and memorable characters who bring a lot of the humour and heart to this rag tag world of survivors. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for this film. The severely watered down violence and gore from the game mixed with the surface level characters who seemingly only exist for nods to the game, has resulted in a film that has failed not only at adapting the popular game series, it also doesn’t cut it as a cohesive story or film that unforunately renders it a difficult watch.

Lilith (Cate Blanchett) is a bounty hunter who, after receiving a job offer from Atlas (Edgar Ramirez) to return to her home planet of Pandora to find Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), Atlas’s daughter who has been kidnapped and held to ransom by Roland (Kevin Hart). Roland is a soldier who has gone off-book and taken Krieg (Florian Munteanu) who may know the location and combination to a legendary vault that holds many valuble treasures. Along for the ride is Moxxi (Gina Gershon), Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis) and the robot Claptrap voiced here by Jack Black.

The story clearly uses the unsuspecting group of misfits who use their differing strengths to come together, form a team and acheive their goal. The problem is we have seen this done many times before, most recently with the extremely successful Guardians of the Galaxy series. The script from director Eli Roth fails to give any character memorable traits (outside of their physical appearance) there are some phenomenal actors here, Blanchett does the best she can with what she is given, but clearly it is the script that lets her down. Hart who has delivered a reputation on being the comedic relief guy in big action films, does little of that here. Curtis is passable here with what little she gets to play with. It takes a steady hand to balance all of these characters and give them each their time to shine and contribute to the larger plot. This is not something that Roth has experience in being able to do and it is clear here.

Big films like this command action scenes that deserve to be seen on the big screen, with explosions and stunt choreography that allows the camera to follow the sequence, creating those truly memorable moments. Regrettably that is all but lost here with the director choosing to go a different route with the exact opposite happening here. The action flies and whizzes past the camera, making it quite difficult to follow what is going on. Being that these scenes are really what the audience is here for, to have it delivered in such an in-coherent way, makes it extremely disappointing.

Borderlands attempts to deliver a family friendly action film, it instead sacrifices the gore and violence that made the game so successful for a watered down film adaptation that fails to connect to the audience on any level. Roping in big name actors like Blanchett and Curtis combined with director Eli Roth still isn’t enough to save this flashy, noisy mess that should have been sent straight to the scrap heap.

Borderlands is in cinemas now

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Video games are the hot new IP in the world of filmmaking, with recent hits like the Sonic the Hedgehog films, The Super Mario Bros Movie and The Last of Us impressing both audiences and critics, while bringing some serious coin for their respective...Borderlands Review