Borderlands Movie Review – Generic And Disposable

We’re in a new era, one in which video game adaptations are seen as just as likely to be good as any other nerdy thing. Whereas many of us used to assume a video game movie would undoubtedly suck, at this point there have been enough good ones that the conventional wisdom has changed. Despite that general shift, the Borderlands movie feels more like a product of the old era–when most game adaptations were generic, disposable action movies at best, and frequently something worse than that. And “generic” and “disposable” is exactly what Borderlands is.

Borderlands, from Hostel director Eli Roth, is an adaptation of the sprawling game franchise set on Pandora, a hostile, desert planet full of corporations and fortune hunters trying to break into a mythical ancient vault that’s allegedly full of all sorts of amazing technology. Enter Lilith (Cate Blanchett, delivering her worst American accent), who’s been hired by a man called Atlas (Edgar Ramirez) to find his kidnapped daughter on Pandora. There’s a catch, of course–the daughter is Tiny Tina (Arianna Greenblatt), and she’s more his creation than his actual daughter, since she was engineered from the blood of ancient aliens for the purpose of opening the vault. And she wasn’t kidnapped–the Atlas soldier Roland (Kevin Hart) rescued her from her captivity.

It’s not long before Lilith catches up to them and shortly after, they’re all attacked by Atlas soldiers. Lilith then has to team up with Roland, Tina, their sympathetic psycho bandit pal, the quirky scientist Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), and the comic relief robot Claptrap to survive and find the vault themselves.

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