Director – Eli Roth – 2024 – US – Cert. 12a – 102m
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A ragtag collective of misfits must outwit their pursuers on a hostile planet– videogame adaptation is out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 9th
Intergalactic bounty hunter Lilith (an orange-haired Cate Blanchett) is hired by the universe’s most powerful industrialist Atlas (Edgar
Ramírez) to find his missing teenage daughter Tiny Tina, last seen on Lilith’s home planet Pandora, famed for an ancient civilisation of the Eridians and their much sought after vault which can only be opened by a member of that race. The planet is a renowned hell-hole, and while Lilith knows her way around there, she has no intention of going back.
Atlas, however, makes her an offer she can’t refuse, so it is that Lilith finds her way to Pandora where she is soon united with Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) who turns out to have a love of using children’s cuddly toys as explosive missiles. Tina is accompanied by a soldier on the lam (Kevin Hart) and a sympathetic if none-too-bright muscleman (Florian Munteanu). Her entourage soon expands to include an irritating motormouth robot (voice: Jack Black) programmed by an unknown client to protect Tina and a cynical scientist (Jamie Lee Curtis). This small, ragtag collective must outwit the army pursuing them across Pandora.
Despite a promising scene in a bar, where various disposable minions sport holographic representations of Atlas’ face while he negotiates with Lilith who has a prisoner in tow, and an equally good-looking sequence in which Tina runs into first the soldier and then the brawn, who help her escape a space station, this swiftly abandons any pretence of character development or even plot in favour of non-stop action sequences which, while you can see all the money on screen, have little or nothing about them to engage the viewer.
Such little plot as there is comes into play in a brief flashback featuring Lilith’s mother (Hayley Bennett, scarcely seen) putting her daughter on a transport to get her off Pandora. There’s a finale in which, by virtue of impressive visual effects, Lilith spouts angel wings of fire, but by then you’ve long since given up on the film and this bravura effects work can’t save it.
Even viewed under optimum conditions on a huge, digital IMAX screen, as its makers intended, this is one of the dullest movies – if not THE dullest – you’ll see all year. A lot of solid work went to making it, which breaks my heart. It’s based on a videogame, and perhaps fans of that will find something to like. For myself, I sat there watching a talented cast and crew unable to do anything with the uninspired material they were given to work with. It’s a lot like a Mad Max movie, but lacking all the qualities that make those movies great. A waste of time. Possible Turkey of the Year. Avoid.
Borderlands is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, August 9th.
Trailer: