½*/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Jamie Lee Curtis
screenplay by Eli Roth and Joe Crombie
directed by Eli Roth
by Walter Chaw Borderlands is what happens if you stop evolving as a human being when you’re a privileged, 16-year-old, cis-gendered, heterosexual male. When you are a mess of hormones and your prefrontal lobe has not finished growing–has barely even started growing, truth be known. Remember the uncontrollable and inexplicable boners? The constant fear and self-loathing that results in your actively seeking out groups you perceive to be vulnerable in order to predate upon them and make yourself bigger? You are violent and emotional and wrapped up in your melodrama. You might pretend that you wrote that song by Counting Crows because you are well aware you’ve done nothing of note and, based on the emptiness inside, probably never will. Yet you believe the world is for you, since you’ve never learned any differently from Dad, the doctor/professor, and Mom, the artist. I read somewhere that dolphins stopped evolving because there was no need: the food was plentiful, and they reached the top of the food chain. I believe certain people stop evolving in the same way because interpersonal and professional success was handed to them, so they didn’t need to develop curiosity, empathy, or humility. I’ve heard that dolphins, incidentally, are assholes, too.
Borderlands is devoid of curiosity, empathy, and humility. I don’t know Eli Roth, but I’ve seen and heard enough to say I would be shocked if he were capable of directing something that exhibited any of those qualities. The film is based on a long-running video game series, and Roth has said he wanted to make a movie he and his bros would deem awesome, which says a lot about the low bar one must clear to entertain Roth and his boys. I’m not even talking about the hint of tragedy in his desire to impress his buddies at age 52–or, closer to the truth, that he would think this excuse for his film to be terrible carries any weight or legitimacy with other sentient beings. In the first five minutes of Borderlands, there’s a snarky voiceover introduction, two Kevin Hart improvs, and Cate Blanchett’s cheekbones and mid-Atlantic American accent drawling, “I’m getting too old for this shit.” French-Romanian absurdist Eugène Ionesco once wrote a play exclusively in platitudes and aphorisms as a satire of the essential representational meaninglessness of language, and Borderlands would comfortably lend itself to an examination of the same. It answers the question of what a film would look like were it composed entirely of cliches. Does it even matter what anyone’s saying half the time? I’m not suggesting Borderlands would have been better as a silent movie. In fact, it would be a lot less interesting, because we wouldn’t have Ionesco to talk about. Yet it might be easier to withstand if you didn’t also need to listen to it. I interviewed Roth back when Cabin Fever, for all its puerility, pointed to an exciting new voice in horror. I asked him what of the highly derivative film was his, and he became immediately uncertain and hostile. Twenty-one years later, I’m still waiting on an answer.
Blanchett is Lilith, a world-weary bounty hunter hired to rescue tween-queen Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), who has been, um, rescued from the set of Star Wars: A New Hope already by another bounty hunter, Roland (Hart). Is there a wisecrack during said rescue about how short Hart is? Does Hart ad-lib a line about stormtroopers? Anyhoo, evil Atlas (Édgar Ramírez) hires Lilith to save Tina from Roland. Did I mention that Tina is Atlas’s daughter through a byzantine science experiment intended to create a biological key for a mysterious vault located on the planet of Pandora? Pandora is one of Saturn’s moons, a figure in Greek mythology blamed for opening a forbidden fruit-like box, and, of course, the place James Cameron is spending the rest of his career. (The first “Borderlands” game was released in October of 2009, predating Avatar by two months. I checked.) Pandora in Borderlands, as you may expect, is a dangerous place, yadda yadda yadda. The first night Lilith is there, she meets a robot named Claptrap (voiced by Jack Black). Claptrap is hyperactive, ingratiating, irritating. He insists on helping Lilith on her quest, and how long have I been talking about the plot? Atlas thinks the vault is full of cool stuff, but maybe it’s stuff bad guys shouldn’t have, so Lilith needs to consider whose side she’s really on. If you’re wondering whether this is some sort of “chosen one” narrative like other underwritten pieces of shit such as The Jewel of the Nile and The Golden Child, I must commend you on your trash-dar. If you think you’re going to find out what’s in the vault, well, that you’re even watching this film tells me you’re prepared for disappointment.
As a big-screen franchise, Borderlands is the very definition of “failure to launch.” Blanchett is bored and directionless (what does she know and when?), Jamie Lee Curtis is badly miscast as Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby, and the only memorable thing about the whole production is how Roth mistakes lighting scenes with a strobe for conjuring excitement. It is manifestly evident that everything that can go wrong with an expensive, IP-driven production starring a prestigious cast too long in the tooth for their roles and helmed by a child with powerful friends has gone wrong. The action sequences are muddy, the picture’s littered with clumsy quips, and it’s rated PG-13 because a suit who’ll be replaced after the next shareholder’s meeting insisted this would make Borderlands‘ first and only weekend slightly more profitable. The script has so many fingerprints on it that it’s inconsistent–wait, how many keys do we need to open this vault?–and incomprehensible; an entire sequence featuring a character called Moxie (Gina Gershon) seems like the product of a cut-and-paste error between drafts. I know you haven’t seen this film. If you catch the inevitable “unrated director’s cut” when it lands on some streaming site 20 days from now, that feeling you’ll feel (half pleasure, half horror) is the confused secondhand embarrassment that happens when a person you don’t like is making an ass of himself on a giant stage. Again.
