The Borderlands movie hides its best ideas under painful jokes

The Borderlands movie, which released in theaters all of 21 days ago, is already available to watch at home through video on demand. This three-week turnaround could be indicative of the movie’s poor box office performance coupled with its poor critical reception. After seeing it for myself, I agree it’s not the best example of a video game movie. However, I also saw moments where the movie took its source material and remixed it into something entertaining. Whether you watch this movie in theaters, at home, or not at all, Borderlands deserves your respect.

Part of that is because honestly, the movie isn’t that bad. It’s visually impressive, with gorgeous styling and action sequences that were actually intelligible instead of greasy-looking smears of CG. It has a bog standard found family / magical MacGuffin plot that manages to say something interesting about the whole “chosen one” trope. 

Cate Blanchett stars as Lilith, a bounty hunter who travels to the planet Pandora to rescue a girl named Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) from the clutches of Roland, a Crimson Lance soldier gone rogue (Kevin Hart) and his psycho accomplice — movie’s description, not mine — Krieg (Florian Munteanu). Lilith discovers that Tina went willingly with her captors and with the unhelpful help of the robot Claptrap (voiced by Jack Black) and the expertise of Dr. Patricia Tanis (Jamie Lee Curtis), Lilith decides to help Tina acquire a powerful artifact to keep it out of the hands of her disgustingly wealthy father, Deukalian Atlas (Edgar Ramírez), CEO of the Atlas Corporation.

Pandora is a harsh desert planet marred by prodigious amounts of waste from both its human and natural inhabitants. If the movie followed the trends currently dominating television and film, the planet would look dark even in the daytime, and everything would be cast in the sickly orange filter Hollywood trots out every time there’s a movie set in a desert — looking at you, Dune. Instead, locations and characters are thoughtfully designed — and adequately lit, imagine that! — making for a movie that is visually pleasing to watch.

I was thoroughly taken aback by how good Cate Blanchett looked as Lilith. With her bright orange hair and deep blue sparkly jacket, Blanchett looked like she had been ripped directly out of the first Borderlands game. When Lilith made her first appearance, I turned to my husband and remarked that this is the most video game looking-ass video game movie I’ve ever seen (affectionate!). Everything else, from the rest of the cast to the props and sets, matched that visual energy without looking cartoonish or fake.

Borderlands, for good or ill, eschewed some of the typical conventions for making a video game movie. Usually, there’s some moment in these kinds of films that functions as a nod to its progenitor. The first-person action sequence in Doom or the Rainbow Road race in The Super Mario Bros. Movie come to mind.

In an interview with Randy Pitchford, creator of the Borderlands games and the film’s executive producer, I asked how he blurred the line between game and film. “We didn’t do any of that,” Pitchford answered. “I hate that shit.” 

According to Pitchford, originally there were plans to make him the movie’s Easter egg for fans of the game, but seeing another video game movie made him change his mind.

“I voice a character in the games named Crazy Earl, and I did five hours of makeup to become Crazy Earl,” he said. Pitchford said that he shot scenes for the movie but had a change of heart after seeing the moment in Uncharted when Mark Wahlberg and Tom Holland randomly run into Nolan North, the voice actor who plays Nathan Drake in the games. 

“There were two problems with that,” he said. “If you know who that is, you’re immediately pulled out of the universe. And if you don’t know, none of that makes any sense. It’s a complete non-sequitur to the storyline, so I asked them to cut me from the movie.”

According to Pitchford, Borderlands “isn’t a video game movie.” Rather, he says, it’s a movie that incorporates the characters, themes, and storylines from the first game, which have been greatly enhanced by stand-out performances from Blanchett and Greenblatt.

Lilith and Tina play well off each other. Neither has a loving family to speak of and is so desperate for one that they latch on to anyone and anything that comes within their orbit. Tina immediately adopts Kreig as her older brother / bodyguard. And despite the fact that Claptrap and Lilith hate each other, they still worked well together.

The dialogue, though, didn’t work so well. Make no mistake: Borderlands isn’t funny. Its style of irreverent humor and stream-of-consciousness dialogue stopped being entertaining around the time Tales for the Borderlands came out in 2014. Hearing Kevin Hart deadpan, “It’s pee. Now I got pee all in the middle of my truck,” made me white knuckle my armrests to keep me from scratching out my eyes. 

The movie also didn’t make good use of its ensemble cast. Take Dr. Patricia Tanis, for example. In the movie, she’s just a plot exposition vehicle, but she could have been much more. According to Tanis’ actress, Jamie Lee Curtis, she brought herself into the role of the reclusive, socially awkward doctor and her attraction to inanimate objects — but that didn’t make it into the final film.

“The whole idea of objective sexuality — the idea of an isolated person falling in love with inanimate objects — I find it a fascinating character trait and played the shit out of it,” Curtis said. “And they cut it all because, I think, people just wouldn’t understand it.”

Lilith and Tina are the main drivers of the film, but the rest of the cast did absolutely nothing until the plot gave them something to shoot, smash, or exposit. I don’t understand how a movie that has both Jack Black and Kevin Hart — two of the most successful comedians in Hollywood — didn’t make me laugh. On top of being woefully miscast as the stoic soldier Roland, Hart was simply window dressing. The movie gave him a big hero moment similar to the one in Borderlands 2, but since he had no personality beyond “There’s pee in my truck,” I didn’t care. Meanwhile, it seemed like the only direction Black got was to be as annoying as possible. Fitting for his character, sure, but ultimately a waste of Black’s manifold talents.

Paying $20–25 to watch Borderlands at home is a tough sell but ultimately worth it. For all the bad decisions in Borderlands, putting Lilith at its center was by far its smartest. Characters like her — cranky, jaded, childless, older women — do not lead action films. And in real life, women like that are all but invisible. But Borderlands, in its styling and storytelling, made Lilith pop off the screen. You couldn’t miss her if you tried. Borderlands earned its poor reception, but for what it does with Lilith, it’s also earned my respect.