Movie Review: Borderlands (2024)
Synopsis: A bounty hunter, Lilith, has vowed never to return to her anarchistic home world of Pandora. However, when the wealthy Atlas offers her too much money to refuse, she agrees to return to Pandora in search of his kidnapped daughter, Tina. With the help of a robot, Claptrap, that has mysteriously been programmed to help her, Lilith is able to locate the teen. Only, Tina hasn't been kidnapped, she is a clone who is hiding from her creator, Atlas, because of a plan to use her to open a secret vault containing advanced technology created by a now-extinct race.
Who's in it? the movie stars Cate Blanchett, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Hart, Ariana Greenblatt and Jack Black.
Review: I had planned on watching the film Glass last night. However, I discovered none of the 10 movie apps/channels I subscribe to have the film unless I pay extra. So, since I now need to wait until I have time to go to the library and get a copy on DVD for free, I ended up picking Borderlands instead.
This was a movie I knew nothing about other than it is based on a video game series I've never played and stars two Academy Award-winning actresses. After watching it, I can honestly say there wasn't much about this movie that was overly special. However, I still enjoyed it a lot more than expected.
I think the thing that surprised me most about this film was how much I loved the main characters. The script was, to put it nicely, limited. However, despite being too good for this kind of movie on paper, I never felt as though Blanchett and Curtis were phoning it in. In fact, while I had some doubts about Blanchett as Lilith, she pulled off the bounty hunter character quite well. Meanwhile, Claptrap (Black) added some nice comic relief while Hart's Roland character was a lot more serious than I would have expected from the comedian.
My favorite in this movie though (and I think my wife agreed) had to be Tina (Greenblatt). She was just such a ridiculously unstable character that was fun to watch simply because you never knew if she was going to need to be rescued or would blow something up with one of her explosive stuffed animals. If nothing else, it at least looked like Greenblatt was having fun playing the character.
As far as the rest of the film goes, it's about what you'd expect from a movie based on a video game. The main storyline probably plays out a bit better in game form and, as I mentioned, the dialog in the script wasn't the strongest and filled with lots of clichés. There is also an awful lot of this movie that seems to be borrowed from Star Wars and other films. I even began to wonder if the filmmakers intentionally wanted people to see that.
I'm also admittedly a little confused about the whole point of finding the vault with the technology. It kind of feels like it would take a whole lot more than that to fix a planet that had been a chaotic mess for generations. If anything, it seems like it would make things worse once the vault was discovered. However, I'll just take the film at the entertainment value and not try to overthink it.
Final Opinion: As far as movies based off video games are concerned, it's not as good as Resident Evil and does have many of the expected limitations. However, it has just enough of a strong performance from the cast to make it watchable and reasonably entertaining.
My Grade: B
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