Boringlands

Poor Cate Blanchett doesn't deserve this.

I’ve never played the Borderlands video game on which the new movie is based. I’m also not entirely clear on how much of the adaptation was helmed by its original director, Eli Roth (Thanksgiving), who was on set when they first shot the movie in 2021, and how much was directed by Tim Miller (the first Deadpool, the last Terminator), who oversaw last year’s reshoots (and yes, doing reshoots two years after the initial production is highly unusual and not a great sign). Point being, I don’t really know at whom to point the finger for this movie being such a dumpster fire, but I feel bad for everyone involved.

I’m writing this mere hours after I saw Borderlands and I’m already having trouble remembering the plot. But the short version is, there’s a bounty hunter (Cate Blanchett) who’s hired by some corporate douche (Edgar Ramírez) to go to the planet called Pandora (not the one from Avatar, obviously) and rescue his daughter (Barbie’s Ariana Greenblatt). But when Cate Blanchett gets there, she finds that the daughter doesn’t want to be rescued and is, in fact, searching for a vault that contains some alien MacGuffin that will do something bad if her father gets it first. Also along for the ride are Kevin Hart as a soldier or bodyguard or something like that trying to protect/help the daughter, a robot voiced by Jack Black, Jamie Lee Curtis as an exposition delivery system, and a monosyllabic Furiosa reject who I did not realize was played by Florian Munteanu (Lil’ Drago in Creed 2) until the credits rolled. Gina Gershon also shows up for a couple of scenes, as does Janina Gavankar (Shivakamini Somakandarkram herself!!!), but they’re wasted as glorified extras.

You think The Marvels was edited down to the bone? Borderlands is one of those movies that feels like it’s being shown in fast-forward. Early on, when Blanchett’s character first arrives on Pandora, she narrates a montage of events that seem like they ought to be full scenes and, I would wager, were indeed full scenes in some prior version of the movie. Characters get all weepy at the prospect of losing one another, except they seem to have said about five words to one another total and have thus established no emotional connection whatsoever. Conflicts are solved with such incredible ease that I’m not even fully comfortable calling them “conflicts.” It’s as though the movie were suicidal, and just wanted to get to the end already.

What the hell did they do in the reshoots for this thing, anyway? Miller is supposed to be an action director, but the action here is poorly executed and bereft of creativity. Technically, the movie is a comedy, but I saw it with a packed house, and I heard one guy in the back - ONE! - chuckle one single time. Not even a full laugh. Just a barely audible “heh.” I’m not even sure what he was chuckling at, to be honest.

Borderlands’ shortcomings are a bummer, because the idea of one of our greatest living actors doing an updated riff on Han Solo should be the coolest thing ever. But they truly did Blanchett dirty here. She gets two arcs, one of which is based in character, one of which is purely superficial; the one based in character is completed about thirty minutes into the movie in a manner that is completely unmotivated and therefore doesn’t land, and the one not based in character at all is completely meaningless and therefore doesn’t land (it’s actually kinda similar to Dakota Johnson’s arc in Madame Web, but somehow even less-fully-baked).

But she still has a better role than Kevin Hart.

I can see why Hart might have found this project appealing on paper (by which I mean “as a concept” - I can’t imagine this movie’s screenplay, by Roth and Joe Crombie, was ever any good). Usually, when Hart shows up in an action-comedy, like Central Intelligence, Ride Along, or the Jumanji sequels, it’s to play a character who is out of his element and not equipped to deal with life and death situations; here, they make a crack about his height early on, but otherwise, his character is a competent bad-ass. If Borderlands wasn’t abysmal, maybe this could have done for him what the original Bad Boys did for Will Smith. But Borderlands is abysmal. So. That didn’t work out I guess.

The movie Borderlands desperately wants to be is Guardians of the Galaxy. And, hey, I get it! James Gunn’s trilogy of comedic space operas are funny, exciting, and moving. Borderlands, in case I’ve failed to make it sufficiently clear, is none of those things. Did any of you see last year’s Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves? That flick also desperately wants to be Guardians of the Galaxy, and while it’s not as good as Gunn’s movies, at least it’s capable, coherent, and charming. You should skip Borderlands and watch that instead.