Action adventure
Rating: 1. Rating scale: 0 to 5.
”Borderlands”
Regi: Eli Roth
Screenplay: Eli Roth, Joe Crombie. Cast: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Ariana Greenblatt, Jamie Lee Curtis, etc. Length: 1 hour 42 minutes (15 years) Language: English. Cinema premiere
Show more Show less
“I’ll lick your spine clean!”. Maybe not the friendliest of greetings but that’s how people talk on the chaos planet Pandora. It is undeniably a painting: we must first imagine that the guttural man will first tear off said body part, and then drag his tongue along it.
But no backbone ever emerges. This is a movie full of massive violence – but not a drop of blood. This is how the American blockbuster usually works its way down to the PG-13 age limit (13 years with adult company) – a smart way to widen the audience base, less ingenious if you want to appease the fans. And there are plenty of those.
The game series “Borderlands” is one of the industry’s biggest and there was a collective shudder through the hordes of gamers when it emerged that the film adaptation, which had been awaited for years, had a more child-friendly appearance. This despite the fact that the splatter director Eli Roth (“Hostel”) holds the levers. (In Sweden, however, there is a 15-year age limit.)
Reach. Lilith (Cate Blanchett, who looks like she wants to be anywhere else) is a cold-blooded bounty hunter who joins forces with some motley souls with a huge capital for violence to save a girl from evil types. They battle the collected scum of the universe who are ravaging the planet in search of a secret vault full of precious things. And maybe the opportunity to rule the universe. A bit unclear. But that is irrelevant. It is the journey that is the goal, but in this case it is also quite uninteresting.
“Borderlands” has a fat budget but an emaciated plot. One mission is completed, which leads to the next, and the next, before the final battle. Like a computer game, one could say a little contemptuously. At least before, when it was a cemented truth that it was not possible to make watchable films and TV series from computer games (“Doom”, “Mortal Kombat”, “Mario” and others) but then came the series “The last of us “, the actually successful “Super Mario” movie from 2023 and this year’s delightfully twisted dystopian series “Fallout” and showed where the computer cabinet should be.
But a successful one transport from controller to cinema requires something more; an emotional software or something else that elevates the game to its own story. Here, instead, it’s bang on the digital red beet, generic action game dialogue and, on some occasions, also a noticeably weak CGI (computer generated images). Undeniably surprising in a billion dollar production.
And when even the technology doesn’t fit, what do we have?
Well, Lilith’s helper, the witty little robot Claptrap, who at least initially lifts the mood. But he soon becomes as tiresome as all the other side-kicks that have become mandatory in the adventure comedy since the enervating kid in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Damned”. Think Jar Jar Binks, C-3PO, Danny DeVito… The manic banter eats away at the spark of life in the same way as an over-refreshed acquaintance on the cancer disk.
See more: Three much more watchable Cate Blanchett efforts: ”Blue Jasmine” (2013), ”Don’t look up” (2021), ”Nightmare alley” (2021).
Read more film and television reviews in DN and other texts by Fredrik Sahlin.
