Borderlands

The planet Pandora is home to a prize that everyone in the galaxy is more than willing to kill to possess, so a bounty hunter and a disparate band of freaks and oddballs are forced together, and set on a path to uncover the planet’s most explosive secret.

I’m not a fan of the Borderlands game franchise.

As a game, Borderlands was just too derivative to hold my interest for long, and it was too try-hard the whole time. It tried too hard to be edgy. It tried too hard to be funny. It tried too hard to be unpredictable and wild. It all-around tried too hard, and as a result, comes off as annoying. Worst of all, it feels like it’s only doing this to hide the fact that the whole game is kind of dull and overly-familiar, at least as far as gameplay goes.

Also, and maybe this doen’t surprise you if you know me, but I find the whole “ka-ka-ka-KA-Razy!” Psycho Clown aesthetic to be boring and tedious. I hate it so much. That whole Insane Clown Posse face paint, off-kilter calliope music, crazy-eyed and skewed posture, “I’m a court jester driven mad by society” thing?

I fucking hate it.

So much.

I can’t stand the whole culture that surrounds the entire Nu-Metal clown scene, especially the low rent Renn Faire atmosphere of something like Knott’s “Scary” Farms. I wanna burn the place to ground… figuratively, of course... but also, I feel like I’m alone in this, as that kind of shit seems to be hugely popular.

For example, there’s a Netflix show called Arcane, and it’s based off a video game called League of Legends, I think. Anyway, there’s a character named Jinx, and she’s the absolute worse, just nails on a chalkboard bad in all the ways that I hate. She’s like Harley Quinn or Deadpool, just with none of the good parts to the characters. Everything about it annoys me. All the skipping around and the cackling and the sing-songy bullshit, all while basically screaming “I’m so CRAZY and unpredictable, and that makes me SCARY” at every single opportunity while standing with their heads down and cocked slightly to the side. "Look at my big hammer! I have a baby voice!" Fuck you. I hate it soooo much.

And the part that floors me, the thing that I don’t get at all, is that it seems to me like the main reason so many people like the show Arcane—and they REALLY like it a lot—is specifically because of the character Jinx.

It boggles my mind

Anyway, Borderlands the game is basically full of this kind of shit. There’s so much maniacal clown cackling. There's entire groups of characters where it's their whole thing. Just a constant barrage of Nu-Metal Psycho Clown bullshit. And on top of that, the game also comes with the bonus of having a shitty controller set-up. 

So, obviously I wasn’t looking forward to this movie, especially after seeing the trailer, where it’s clear that the film is just trying to rip off The Guardians of the Galaxy in tone, style, and music cues. Then I saw that the director is Eli Roth, and it was definitely a "No Thank You" for me, because Eli Roth is a terrible non-talent who also seems like he’d be a huge douchebag in real life too. So, I basically had no intention of seeing this movie.

But then it bombed. Big time.

Reportedly costing around $150 million dollars, and then appearing on streaming after only 3 weeks in theatres, because it only made around $30 million combined from its domestic and international box offices in those 3 weeks, Borderlands is a flop. It’s an absolute bomb. It’s such a failure, that it could be a career ender in some cases, and hopefully one of those cases is Eli Roth. 

It’s not the worst flop of all time, of course. I think that title goes to The Flash, which cost somewhere between 250 and 300 million dollars, and only made 270 million worldwide, which not only doesn’t cover the budget, but the general rule of thumb for Hollywood is that a film needs to make twice its budget to be considered a success, which is why Hollywood films are so dependent on the international box office now. So, The Flash basically lost around 250 million dollars. Of course, WB was somewhat able to absorb that blow, especially with that loathsome piece of shit corporate scumbag David Zaslav taking Warner Brothers Studios down to the chop shop and selling off the parts, cheap.

But Lionsgate, on the other hand, especially with both the Crow remake and Megalopolis also off to rocky starts and highly unlikely to be box office hits, this could be a big problem for them, so this interested me. Will this whole Borderlands debacle destroy Lionsgate, in much the same way Tom Cruise’s The Mummy destroyed Universal’s Dark Universe investment? It’s possible. We shall see.

Anyway, the story goes like this…

The planet Pandora looks like Mad Max met Tatooine and the two of them had a really dumb baby who lived in a trailer park/garbage dump, and then the cast of a “punk rock” version of a Peter Pan musical was given free reign with the graffiti, and it's to this derivative place that an infamous bounty hunter returns home after many long years away. She falls in with a ragtag team of misfits, and together, they must battle monsters and bandits and corporate security forces as they tear across the surface of the planet in a race to use The One to unlock the Prophecy, so that they can be the first to find the legendary Vault—a near-mythical treasure chamber that is said to house an untold number of ancient and priceless alien secrets and technology—before the evil Corporation dogging their heels can.

So, I knew Borderlands was going to be bad.

I mean, how could it not be, right? Cate Blanchett’s character (Cate Blanchett?? What the fuck!) even says “I’m getting too old for this shit“ at one point. That is the whole film in a nutshell. The dialogue is just a bunch of randomly strung-together action movie cliches, and that’s pretty much the best part. I was not ready for how bad this film was going to be, and I've watched some trash in my day, y’know?

And just to be clear, I'm not talking about low budget trash--I've seen plenty of those films too--I'm talking about the true failures, the big budget pieces of shit, the ones with potentially all the money and resources and talent that a big ol' tent pole blockbuster could need, and yet, still turned out terrible. I actually saw Ready Player One in the theatre. I sat all the way through Battle Angel Alita. I’ve actually watched both Rebel Moons part 1 and part 2! On purpose too! I didn’t watch the Director’s Cuts, of course, I’m not a masochist, but I have watched both Avatars, people, despite the fact that they're based on a super racist white savior trope! So, my point is, I’ve watched some lazy and uninspired, poorly conceived and even more poorly executed “films” before, I'm familiar with bad, understand?

But… god damn, Borderlands is really bad. Wow.

But what makes this film truly terrible is that it’s not bad in any notable way, and certainly not in an entertaining or fascinating way. It’s just bad, plain old bad, and you shouldn’t watch it. It’s really not all that surprising to see that this film comes from the same people behind movies like Uncharted and Venom, which were both ugly and derivative films, so points for being consistent, I guess.

But yeah... it's bad. All bad. Boring. Slow. Mediocre. Uninspired.

Bad.

Brief side tangent… Ariana Greenblatt has now played Lil’ Gamorra, and Lil’ Ahsoka, and now she’s here, playing the character Tiny Tina. So, I guess that’s a pattern now. Additionally, from the way some of the crowd scenes were shot, the way several scenes featured a silent person who didn’t do anything but stand semi-awkwardly next to the character with a speaking role, all while not quite looking like the rest of the film’s world, makes me wonder if, had I given a shit about this game, not to mention the whole video game company scene in general, would I have recognized a lot of people, who were in some way responsible for the making the game, doing a little cameo in this trash-ass film? I don't, of course, so I didn't, but still... I wondered. Since I don’t know anything about this whole world, all I can say is this film has more than a few moments with a weirdly featured random person who just kind of stands there in the foreground being really bad at pretending to interact with an actor.

Whatever. Moving on…

Now, I’ve heard some people say that this film isn’t enough like the game, that it’s not a very good adaptation. Maybe that’s fair, although I’d put forth that it doesn’t matter if it’s a ”good” adaptation or not, if every other part remains as badly done. But at the same time, I don’t know if that’s really true or not, that it’s actually a bad adaptation. Now admittedly, I’m not an expert on the game really, I never finished it, but the film does seem a lot like the game to me, at least, in the way I remember it. Also, the plot and the backstory sounded pretty close to the babbling nonsense I ignored while smashing my A button repeatedly so that I could skip the cutscenes. There’s a ton of the game’s trademark “crazy” guns are all over the place too.

Plus the film was bad, just like the game is, so… it seemed accurate to me.

Anyway…

Featuring a story with little to no drama, and zero earned emotional moments or connections between the characters, and is instead full of perfunctory moments of “danger” and too much “witty” banter, not to mention the most worn out of action movie cliches, and all while the shallowest sketches of characters explain the story to each other, and all with a bunch of destiny/prophecy talk awkwardly welded on for a little extra bit of unnecessary and obvious baggage, Borderlands is certainly a special experience, but only in how it is so bad that even the general movie-going public recognized this from miles away, and said…

And for the most part, they didn’t even bother to go see it.

Finally, like a rotten cherry atop an awful sundae, Bobby Lee has a small cameo. He sucks, both in general and in this movie, but at least he's playing the film’s “Not Greedo” so that almost made up for his presence. Kinda. Not really. Honestly, it doesn't really matter at this point, once you’ve realized that you’re eating a shit sandwich, does more shit really make that much of a difference?

Anyway… don’t watch this film.