Critics and audience responses were not particularly good for Borderlands when it first came out in the theatres.
At that time, I thought, with such a great cast with both acting and comedic chops like Cate Blanchett, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Hart, and Jack Black playing iconic roles of an iconic video game franchise, how could things go that wrong?
Never had a chance to watch it when it was in the theatres because it came and went quickly. But being a huge Cate Blanchett fan, I was determined to check it out at some point.
That opportunity came when I was on my flight from Sydney to Christchurch. So, I thought that’s a good way to kill some time on the flight.
The film was not a particularly long one, just over 1.5 hours. However, as I sat through it, I started to understand why it flopped. Being the second movie for the flight (after that amazingly good Inside Out 2), I was quite glad that I couldn’t finish it because the plane is landing, and I needed to disembark.
Nonetheless, on my returning flight, I decided to give it another go to finish it, thinking maybe it got better in the second half. I just need to give it the opportunity to shine.
Boy, I was so wrong.
As I finally finished the movie, I was more than happy to get a champaign that came with the meal to celebrate my success – in finishing one of the most bothersome movies I have watched in the recent years.
The thing is, it was not the acting that was bad, well at least for some of the leads. Cate Blanchett was trying hard, so was Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Hart. Ariana Greenblatt tried her best to turn a hollowly written character into something, but when a film was trying so hard to be everything all at once, it risks falling apart into a pile of ashes that its only worth was to be blown away or serve as the fertilisers for something great that could be followed.
I have not played the video game at all, so I did not have the pre-conception of how those characters should look like or behave like. But when I watched the story unfolded, all the characters looked like cliches of their own category haphazardly put together a la Guardians of the Galaxy manner. The only thing is, they lacked the cohesion and chemistry of the latter, despite trying hard to do so. A self-esteemed mercenary returned to her home planet that she loathed matching up with an ‘act like cute but deadly’ girl running away from her father, teaming up with someone of her past and a talkative and ultra-annoying robot. When you have seen them together, you have seen them all. You can only do that much with paper thin characters in a meaningless alliance.
One of the highlights that was so bad was Jack Black’s robot Claptrap. I love Jack Black in the rebooted Jumanji franchise. He brought layers to a character that could be extremely annoying, but he made it cute, purpose and interesting. But with Claptrap, apart from being annoyingly loud and quick talking, while doing everything he was told not to do so and leading the group into one peril after another, I have no idea what’s the purpose of that character. Ariana Greenblatt’s Tiny Tina character was just as superficial and annoying, but even as a person who is not familiar with the story of the video game original, the so-called twists were so predictable that you can score immediate wins if you are at a bingo game in a veteran club. Kevin Hart was trying to act outside of his type, which you can tell, and I do appreciate, but when being out yelled by the rest of the group, all his character had left were just a few choreographed fight scenes.
As for the villains, casting some really good-looking people to be villains do not make them immediately likeable or relatable. They have to have a proper cause that the audience can associate with. What made Thanos in the Infinity Saga so relatable because he had a point, and that is a point that audience could mull through and understand. But ice thin motivations as excuses for CGI and action spectaculars are not reasons for the audience to care about these villains.
I really wanted to like Borderlands, it has Cate Blanchett, Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Hart in it. But, unlike the empty movie plot, I really struggle to put a positive spin on it. Even writing it now after two weeks, it still bothered me that a movie that was supposed to have so much potential, ended up belonging to the trash planet it portrayed.
