‘I’ ON CULTURE
Let’s make it simple. Borderlands is not a good movie at all. It clearly wanted to be like Guardians of the Galaxy or Jumanji, but lacks the charm of either of them. It might well have been written by artificial intelligence (AI), since there are few really human emotions throughout. It is based on a computer game, and just as the characters the players choose, the characters are essentially empty shells at the start. The problem is that in this film, they are pretty much the same right up to the ending.
A young girl, Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) is a mental patient in a major space station when it is attacked. Her bodyguard Roland (Kevin Hart) kills many of the attackers, but the two are separated, and she is grabbed up by another psycho patient — huge, masked Krieg (Florian Munteanu). The girl’s father Atlas (Edgar Ramirez), one of the richest, nastiest men in the galaxy, hires bad-ass mercenary bounty hunter Lilith (Cate Blanchett) to get the girl back, something logical because the girl has been taken to her home planet Pandora.
Pandora is a total mess, and Lilith knows it. But she is being well-paid. Early on, she meets the robot Claptrap (voiced by Jack Black), who has been programmed to assist her, and he is able to locate Tina. But Tina is far from a victim or crazy. She’s dangerous, an expert with demolitions, and not willing to go back to her father, who only wants her because she can open what is called the Eridian Vault, a repository for all sorts of technology from an earlier race. But when the soldiers called the Crimson Lance come after Tina, Lilith joins with her, along with Krieg, Roland and Claptrap in a wild race to escape. Soon they come upon Dr. Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), Lilith’s foster mother, and she provides key information. At that point, it is mainly a chase to the end.
The problem really is that even though the cast is made up of good actors, the parts themselves are boring. The central characters in Guardians and Jumanji, played by Chris Pratt and Dwayne Johnson, are interesting, actually even fun. Blanchett, one of our best actresses, is simply one note for almost the entire movie. When “the Rock” is more interesting than Blanchett, you know things have gone bad. I kept noting that throughout the action, as she was knocked around, her hair, a terrible red wig, stayed perfectly stable. It had an interesting wave and swept up to one side of her face, and even after she was blown aside several times and was bruised and limping, the hair was perfectly in place.
Kevin Hart, really funny in Jumanji, played it totally straight here. No quick quips, no joking. It helped, I guess, that even after he was overwhelmed by dozens of semi-zombies, they were all dead and he crawled out from under them. Good in a game, lousy in a movie. Jamie Lee Curtis seemed in a trance for most of her part. Jack Black’s voice in the robot, a sort of mock Rocket Raccoon, was simply grating. Not efficient, singing part of the time, and used as a plot device far too often. Ramirez was OK as the nasty dad. Greenblatt, who was 13 when this was made, was the most interesting character, but there was no rational explanation given for a lot of the bits about her.
There are a few things that make these kinds of movies interesting. The first of them is having characters that are themselves interesting or who change in ways that are interesting. This movie did not have that at all. Second, might be really scary enemies. Here, most of them were either gone so fast there was no suspense at all, or simply just orcs, game pieces that are there to be killed. When a tiny group can wipe out hundreds and walk away unscathed, you know we are wasting time.
This is one of those films that I report on so you don’t have to spend $10 or so watching (and let’s not forget the increasing cost of popcorn and drinks). If you wait and spend $4 watching it in a month or so on pay per view, you will only be wasting $4. In other words, this is a stinkeroo. Miss it.