Borderlands

This weekend, Borderlands, a new action-adventure movie based on the video game series of the same name, releases in theaters. Borderlands follows a bounty hunter named Lilith who is hired to rescue a child who is said to fulfill a prophecy about a missing vault. The trailers did a good job of hooking me into the film. It looked like a mix of Guardians of the Galaxy and Mad Max: Fury Road, two movies I greatly enjoy. For some context, I have never played any of the Borderlands games and have no bearing on whether the movie is accurate to the game.

Unfortunately, this movie is not very good. It does a decent job with the world building and establishing the rules of the society but that is about the only positive that I have. While the movie does take some plot elements from Guardians of the Galaxy and Mad Max, it has none of the charm, style, or action. This movie is about as generic as a Sci-Fi blockbuster can get. It brings in a bunch of big-name actors, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Cate Blanchet, and Jamie Lee Curtis but gives them nothing to work with. None of the characters have any sort of charm or defining character traits. Kevin Hart doesn't even get to do his Kevin Hart thing and is essentially just a bland ex-soldier. None of the characters have any sort of chemistry together. They aren't even given any banter to have to opportunity to play off of each other. I don't think it's necessarily the actors that don't have chemistry together as much as it is the writing didn't give them anything to work with. The plot itself is incredibly generic and forgettable and the big finale is pulled straight from Captain Marvel and just feels so out of place with where the rest of the story was. The movie also lacks much of any humor to it. Jack Black's character supplies most of the funny moments but none of them got more than a chuckle. This is again, more of a knock on the writing than the actors as the actors just didn't have anything to work with. Finally, I felt that the movie had no discernable style to it. It just felt like a generic blockbuster without any of the charm. A movie with this kind of setting would be a perfect opportunity to have some highly colorful locations and stylized action but there just isn't any.

Overall, this is just a bland forgettable adventure movie that has no likable characters, charm, or any sort of memorable style to it. This is probably the blandest version of this story that they could make.

Score: 5/10 Grade: C Recommendation: Skip it