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Movie Review: Borderlands

Mike Tyrkus

The latest post-apocalyptic landscape sprawling wannabe sci-fi epic, Borderlands is not only both and extremely tedious and dull film, but it is also strikingly uninteresting and consequently sets a new low standard for director Eli Roth, whose previous output was nothing to brag about either.

Centered around a bounty hunter named Lilith (Cate Blanchett), the story follows her as she is given the assignment of locating the daughter of a powerful criminal named Atlas (Edgar Ramirez). This young lady – named Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) – is currently on the run with Roland (Kevin Hart) and Krieg (Florian Munteanu), when Lilith catches up to her and, with the assistance of Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis) and wise-cracking robot Claptrap (Jack Black), becomes intertwined in a quest to unearth the greatest secrets in the universe (all of which appear to be stored somewhere inside a planet called Pandora.

Unfortunately, that description is about as intriguing as the film’s plot ever gets, which is not very surprising given director Eli Roth’s straightforward and brutal approach to filmmaking. Based on a best-selling videogame franchise, the film feels like exactly that, a series of spectacles interconnected by a loose and often incomprehensible story. The script, written by Roth and Joe Crombie, fails to address any world building or any other logical set up other than a sprawling opening sequence wherein Blanchett’s character conveys the current state of the universe to the audience in rather colorful language.

Cate Blanchett in “Borderlands.” Photo by Courtesy of Lionsgate/Courtesy of Lionsgate – © 2024 Lionsgate.

As the anchor of the film, Blanchett does her best to keep things remotely relatable for the audience. But there’s little she can do saddled with the incomprehensible setup and uninspired story that plays out before her. Other players, including Hart as a rogue soldier name Roland, play secondary roles to both Blanchett and Greenblatt, but none of the characters are afforded any great depth other than their generic “character” profiles. Ultimately, they all coalesce into a hodge podge of stereotypes that never find a foothold or garner any great attention from the audience.

Although the film is not as dark as most within this genre, cinematographer Rogier Stoffers instead utilizes a colorful palette provided by Andrew Menzies’ production design and Zsuzsa Kismarty-Lechner’s art direction. The problem however is that the state of the universe in which the story takes place calls for the typical dystopian nightmare that necessitates the hero freeing the subjugated from the confines of said purgatory. This world is never setup as awful or as anything that needs to be fixed – it is simply violent. To put it bluntly, there are no real stakes involved here.

To say that Eli Roth’s Borderlands is a bore would be the most brutal critique of the film, but it is far more than just that, it is also a colossal waste of time.

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Mike Tyrkus

Editor in Chief at CinemaNerdz.com
An independent filmmaker, co-writer and director of over a dozen short films, the Editor in Chief of CinemaNerdz.com has spent much of the last three decades as a writer and editor specializing in biographical and critical reference sources in literature and the cinema, beginning in February 1991 reviewing films for his college newspaper. He was a member of the Detroit Film Critics Society, as well as the group's webmaster and one-time President for over a decade until the group ceased to exist. His contributions to film criticism can be found in Magill's Cinema Annual, VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever (of which he was the editor for nearly a decade until it too ceased to exist), the International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, and the St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia (on which he collaborated with editor Andrew Sarris). He has also appeared on the television program Critic LEE Speaking alongside Lee Thomas of FOX2 and Adam Graham, of The Detroit News. He currently lives in the Detroit area with his wife and their dogs.

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