By Jake Wilson
BORDERLANDS ★★
(M) 101 minutes, cinemas
Limping into cinemas years after it was shot, Eli Roth’s sci-fi adventure-comedy Borderlands has the aura of a predestined loser. The plot, loosely founded on a video game of the same name, is as hokey as hokum gets: a tough bounty hunter (Cate Blanchett) racing over the surface of a despoiled planet to rescue a young girl (Ariana Greenblatt from Barbie) who’s said to be the Chosen One.
Cate Blanchett as Lilith and Ariana Greenblatt as Tiny Tina in Borderlands.
Why anyone thought Blanchett’s involvement would help bring in the target demographic is a bit of a mystery: certainly there’s not much here for Tar or Carol fans. But the choice is of a piece with the general approach to casting, which has resulted in the kind of random “all-star” line-up more commonly assembled for a Dreamworks animated spectacular.
Jack Black, the Kung Fu Panda himself, supplies the voice of a wisecracking robot named Claptrap, who looks like a wheelie bin, sounds like a 1940s radio comic and annoys the bejesus out of everybody (our knowing that he’s being awful on purpose doesn’t make him any funnier).
As one of Blanchett’s rivals in the mercenary game, Kevin Hart seems determined not to be the comic relief, which doesn’t give him space to make much of an impression of any sort. Elsewhere, we have Edgar Ramirez as the smooth corporate villain, Gina Gershon as a kind of intergalactic burlesque queen, and Jamie Lee Curtis as a snippy scientist who shows up halfway through for exposition purposes.
There’s also a hulking but ultimately good-hearted psycho in a hockey mask (Florian Munteanu), who mostly grunts, and who never becomes memorable or distinctive in any way. At first, I assumed he was included as a nod to Roth’s background as a director of gruesome horror movies, but it turns out similar figures loom large in the original games, which does raise the question of why Roth was hired in the first place, and whether the producers originally planned on a more brutal, rambunctious approach.
Cate Blanchett as Lilith, Kevin Hart as Roland, Ariana Greenblatt as Tiny Tina, Florian Munteanu as Krieg and Jamie Lee Curtis as Tannis in Borderlands. Credit: Katalin Vermes/Lionsgate
Adding to the puzzle are reports of reshoots without Roth’s involvement (the first act relies heavily on voiceover, a common sign of trouble). Whatever really happened behind the scenes, the final product is more or less kid-friendly, despite a lot of breezy murdering and an underlying sourness.
The heroes snipe at each other relentlessly, and rarely appear to be enjoying each other’s company, which makes it difficult to buy them as an eventual surrogate family, even a dysfunctional one like the Guardians of the Galaxy. Nor is there any trace of the wit that writer-director James Gunn brought to the Guardians films: Claptrap aside, Roth’s idea of comedy is a chase through a local landmark known as Piss Wash Gully, which is just as its name suggests.
With all of this, the film is, disconcertingly, not that bad. It doesn’t test your patience. The sets look like sets, which is better than having them look like randomly generated CGI backdrops, and all up there’s more visual coherence than in the last batch of Marvel films (perhaps it helps that the budget wasn’t that large by blockbuster standards – reports say only a hundred million or so). At best, the widescreen compositions full of brightly coloured junk have a pop-punk, everything-is-trash vibe that harks back to 1990s satires such as Escape from LA.
Blanchett, though, is no Kurt Russell. Lightness has never been among her gifts: like a teacher roped into a school play, she appears to see the whole enterprise as a bit of a lark, but hardly the kind of thing she would ever consider watching on her own account. Not that I can blame her.
Borderlands is now in cinemas.
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