Borderlands - Another Video Games Adaptation that Would not Please Critics but Enjoyable Enough for Audience Looking for Simple Plot, Loud Action and Sarcastic Jokes

Once again a new movie based on video games was released in the theaters. As a fan of action comedy that looked like fun, I was obviously interested to see this in a cinema with good sound system. But since I was not really convinced it would have Dolby Atmos effect, I chose to see this in a studio with standard system, together with another film yesterday. OK, let's just get started then. 

Brief Story Line

Lilith (Cate Blanchett - Nightmare Alley, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World etc) was a well known bounty hunter who was hired by the powerful boss Atlas (Edgar Ramírez - The 355, The Undoing mini series etc) to locate his daughter Tina (Ariana Greenblatt - 65 etc) in Pandora planet. Tina was kidnapped by a rogue soldier named Roland (Kevin Hart - Lift, The Man from Toronto etc) who escaped to Pandora together with the psychotic Krieg (Florian Munteanu - Creed III, The Contractor etc).

Though reluctant, Lilith decided to take the job and went to Pandora where she would meet a wisecracker robot named ClapTrap (voiced by Jack Black - The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Kungfu Panda 3 etc) that insisted to go along with her. As she worked on locating Tina, Lilith realized that she had to cooperate with Roland and few people from her past including Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis - Haunted Mansion 2023 remake, Knives Out etc) to fight a bigger threat.

So what would happen to Lilith and her new found friends? You could find out in this movie.

End of Brief Story Line

As expected, this movie was filled with some loud action and plenty of comedic moments with a very generic plot that was simple and not complicated at all. Which was why I was not surprised by the very shallow story and the lack (if not zero) character development. Since I already expected those, I was not disappointed by the film and was still able to enjoy it together with my wife, particularly the comedic side where we would sometimes laugh out loud, usually due to ClapTrap's sarcastic comments.

Both of us felt Cate Blanchett really kicked ass in here and she was pretty convincing as the heroine with her style. Though it was not the stylish kind, but the action sequence was pretty exciting to my opinion. Some of them were quite entertaining with good enough visual effects, although they were not exactly the very spectacular kind. I found out that it had a large budget of > USD 100 million which sadly did not translate to a well crafted action comedy film that the producers had hoped for. Looking at the poor box office performance and low audience & negative reviews, this definitely would be a huge loss.

The movie itself was adapted from the popular video game series developed by Gearbox Software. I had never played the game at all so I had no idea or familiarity with the characters that were shown here. But I could really see them as playable characters with different specialties who were likely getting better background story in the game. Aside from those characters I mentioned above, there was also some support cast like Gina Gershon (Face/Off, Killer Joe etc) as Mad Moxxi, Javina Gavankar (Blindspotting, The L Word TV series etc) as Commander Knoxx and several others in minor capacity. It was directed by Eli Roth whose past works were mostly gore horror movies like Thanksgiving, Hostel etc. However, as this movie is rated PG-13, you would not be seeing those bloody scenes in here despite a lot of kilings done.

The film had a duration of 102 minutes including closing credits. There was a brief mid end credit scene for added fun but no post end credit scene. Overall this was a movie that was purely for fun. It is not comparable to the more recent better video games adaptation and felt more like the ones in the past which were more mostly poor in quality. I am not sure either if this movie would be well received by fans of the games, hence it would probably be another box office bomb. So if you just want to have a little bit of fun watching some outer space action combined with comedy, then you could possibly enjoy this like me and my wife. But if you expect great things, then better skip this one. 

Mike's movie moments rating: 3 out of 5 stars