Borderlands Movie Review: Cate Blanchett has proven her versatility over the past few years, but she hasn’t quite nailed the Hunger Games or Mad Max yet. She’s stepping into the fantasy action genre with her new film, which, unfortunately, seems easier said than done. She’s always had the body language of an action star, even when her filmography has included serious dramas. It’s great to watch her shoot guns, jump around and flash a smile, but she needs a much better medium to prove her worth on this front.
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it’s Pandora’s box
Kat plays Lilith, a bounty hunter tasked by a wealthy businessman to return to his isolated homeland of Pandora to retrieve his kidnapped daughter. However, when she meets the daughter, she discovers the father is the problem. Along the way, she joins forces with unexpected allies, including another gun-toting warrior named Roland (Kevin Hart), a masked Buffy friend named Chrome (Olivier Richters), a resourceful scientist named Patricia (Jamie Lee Curtis) and a tiny robot called Claptrap (voiced by Jack Black).
The concept of strange companions traveling through a futuristic world makes Borderlands feel oddly familiar to Guardians of the Galaxy. But as quickly as that familiarity comes on, it vanishes. The action sequences, while fairly frequent and serviceable, are so dull as to lack originality at all. There are car chases, traversing a tunnel with acid flowing down it, and navigating a cave full of bad guys. But it all feels like checking off all the steps of a video game (hey, Borderlands is a video game adaptation), not a real journey.
The unimaginative worldbuilding doesn’t help either. Every threat they face, every weapon they use, every terrain they traverse feels visually derivative and conceptually stale. There’s not a single piece of imagery that stayed with me, except for Claptrap pulling bullets out of his anus. Jack Black does his best to liven up the script with his zingers and fiery dialogue. He even strikes a kung fu (panda) pose in one action sequence. But Claptrap is not going to captivate us enough to make us want to fall for him and appreciate him, the joke goes. His Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle co-star Kevin Hart is hardly fun, even if his jamming with Jack made for a pretty fun time in that film.
Kat deserves better
Jack and Kat still managed to create a fantastical world in Eli Roth’s 2018 fantasy comedy The House with a Clock in Its Walls. But here, they struggle from the start. Even Keerthy Suresh’s Buji makes a more worthy techno companion to Prabhas’ Bhairava in Nag Ashwin’s recent dystopian science-fiction epic Kalki 2898 A.D. Towards the end of the film, Kat’s character delivers a dialogue to the villain before making the final move: “I have something you don’t have enough of.” If Eli and his co-writer Joe Crombie had worked on that theme from the beginning and kept it consistent, Borderlands could have been a more level-headed film. But alas, like the rest of the film, that dialogue too turns out to be just another ‘claptrap’.
It could have been an emotional coming-of-age story, like Ladybird or Causeway, under the guise of an action fantasy. But that track feels more forced rather than woven in naturally. The cut is evident in the way the two Oscar winners – Kat and Jamie Lee Curtis – try to give the proceedings some emotional weight. But at the end of the day, Borderlands remains just a hollow action spectacle, best enjoyed in 4DX. While we, along with Kat, wait for her definitive action film, let’s make do with that brief but captivating turn as Hela in Thor: Ragnarok. At the very least, it’s a trap worth clapping for.
