Borderlands is the latest video game adaptation from director Eli Roth, and Tim Miller if you want to include the extensive reshoots he directed. It has an all-star, yet strange, cast of Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Édgar Ramírez, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu, and Jamie Lee Curtis. While the film wrapped production, it wouldn’t be until three years later that it would finally see the light of the day due to struggle in post-production and with reshoots. Needless to say, I think all of us called it when we knew this was going to be bad from the get go.

Like I said, I always had a bad feeling about this movie. When it was announced that Eli Roth was directing, I found that to be such a strange choice due to his track record in the movies he made. I wasn’t at all surprised to see the Rotten Tomatoes score, yet I still wanted to see it for myself. To start off, I do think Cate Blanchett tends to be the saving grace for anything that she is in. She is quite good in this. I didn’t mind her at all. She even makes some of the action exciting. I know she said that she took on this role due to the doom & gloom that was happening in the world at the time with the pandemic. One, I don’t blame her. Two, you can tell where she’s having fun with it, which helps. Honestly, if you like Blanchett or even love action, I think there’s much worse movies to watch.

Onto the bad, and there’s quite a bit. The one negative aspect I want to bring up is the music choices, because it seems like it’s not getting enough attention. I am tired of movies trying to throw in popular songs from the last decade in order to make you like it more. I am glad that myself, along with everyone else, can see through that and recognize how bad it is. As a Muse fan, I am tired of movies thinking that Supermassive Black Hole is their best song. It’s not, and it especially shows what the studio thinks of this movie: that it’s cooler than what it is.

I have been seeing a lot of comparisons to Guardians of the Galaxy. While I’d agree with that, director Eli Roth has even said that he was inspired by other great films like Star Wars and The Fifth Element more than the video game itself, and it shows. Problem is that he completely relies on these better movies that the movie ends up making no sense and tries to look cooler than what it is. Due to how bad it is, the film is desperate to get your attention. Instead, it ends up becoming a lot of pointless noise.

Better yet, the film is a cliche of the better films Roth ripped off of. There is pointless voiceover dialogue and exposition dumps to “help” us better understand. Instead, it comes off redundant as it thinks we, the audience, is too dumb to understand. Craig Mazin initially wrote the script for this, but was taken off due to how much Roth rewrote. It leads to a disastrous script where conveniences occur and nothing is as funny as it thinks it is.

With a $100 million budget, it baffles me how the film chooses to spend its money. With the selected cast, you’d think the movie would rely more on them for the humor since the cast doesn’t really mimic the video game characters. It’s apparent that with the revision Roth made in the script, it leads to a lot of cringey & unfunny dialogue. The massive budget also doesn’t do the visual effects any favors. There were moments that made the movie look like it was made in the early 2000’s.

Overall, Borderlands is a bad imitation of better movies. It shouldn’t go unnoticed that this movie should have fallen in line better with the video games more than any of the movies it tried to copy. With a better director, this film could have been really special and spark interest in the video games like Fallout did. It’s clear this was always going to be bad from the jump, and it shows. I can’t emphasize how uninspired this movie is.

VERDICT: 1/5 – Really Bad