Title – Borderlands (2024) 

Director – Eli Roth (Hostel) 

Cast – Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Ariana Greenblatt, Jamie Lee Curtis, Edgar Ramírez, (voice of) Jack Black 

Plot – A mismatched group of guns for hire and all round misfits find themselves on the dangerous planet of Pandora working alongside the mysterious Tiny Tina (Greenblatt) who holds the keys to a life-changing and deadly power.  

“I’m a bounty hunter, not a babysitter”

Review by Eddie on 25/09/2024

In February we were gifted (cursed?) with what appeared to be an undeniable and undisputed champion of the years worst film in the form of the irredeemably bad Madame Web, but in a further reminder that nothing is ever truly set in stone, August has provided us with a genuine challenger in big-budget video game adaptation Borderlands.

A film whose director abandoned it well before re-shoots took place over the past years, as the feature battled a serious case of development hell and a film whose original co-writer Craig Mazin (the man who gifted us hit series The Last of Us and Chernobyl!) fought to get his name replaced with an alias of Joe Crombie, there were a number of warning signs making themselves very apparent before Eli Roth’s $100+ million ever reached cinema screens but no one was prepared for just how atrocious this D.O.A offering actually was. 

Sinking to a genuinely disastrous global box office haul of just over $30 million, Borderlands ineptitude is going to go down in the record books not only as another sad and sorry example of a video game adaptation gone wrong but a criminally lifeless event that got every aspect of its existence wrong from terrible casting decisions, production design choices, directional styles to The Room like script work, Borderlands is devoid of anything that is close to a resemblance of a good feature film. 

A great mystery of the lore of Borderlands will forever be how on earth Roth and the creative team behind this turkey managed to enlist the support of Oscar winners Cate Blanchett and Jamie Lee Curtis or the far above the likes of this garbage performers like Edgar Ramírez or the voice of Jack Black, whose vocal talents here as annoying robot Claptrap are so distorted you wonder why anybody couldn’t of done his no doubt high-paying gig?, what anyone could’ve seen in this project based on an end result here is highly suspect. 

When one looks at Borderlands the property, which mainly includes the 3 core games in the Gearbox owned series, it’s not a narrative that instantly inspires thoughts of a full-length feature but how its wild and colourful world of crazy monsters, gun loving psychos and whacky yet lovable core characters got turned into this uninspired waste of money is anyone’s guess with the only logical reasoning to be whatever original vision this film had got lost along the way with a studio changing direction and Deadpool director Tim Miller unable to work magic when he was called upon to take lead on reshoots. 

In the battle of 2024’s most notable and notorious bad films you have to hand it still to Madame Web, which at least provides mortifying entertainment with its seemingly intentional sabotaging whereas Borderlands isn’t even slightly amusing in its crimes, as its boredom inducing 100 minutes provides nothing but failure after failure to launch, embarrassing all who partook or gifted their money in making this film come to fruition. 

Final Say – 

A film that is likely to remain relevant long into the future as a prime example of the Hollywood movie-making system gone very bad, Borderlands is an unjustifiably bad non-event that marks itself down as a career low-point for all involved. Not even close to so bad it’s good, Borderlands is a film best left avoided at all costs to ones sanity and trust in humanity. 

0 Emmy winning screenwriters out of 5