Borderlands video game movie fails to find Fallout's nuclear formula (2024)

The Borderlands movie shoots into cinemas today, hot on the heels of a veritable stockpile of video-game adaptations flooding TV and film in recent years.

From Nintendo's billion-dollar animated effort The Super Mario Bros. Movie last year to the incoming Sonic the Hedgehog threequel, video-game adaptations are big business and they seem to be getting better.

Prime Video's Fallout adaptation became the second-biggest show ever on the platform, while The Last of Us is easily one of HBO's best shows and crucially season two is highly anticipated for fans beyond the games.

Sure, extended runtimes certainly make things easier for world-building, character development and even more Easter eggs, but more isn't always better. In fact, Borderlands' runtime clips in at a lean-ish 100 minutes. A rare treat in modern cinema.

The problem with Borderlands is that although it's an incredibly faithful adaptation visually, with fun needle drops and a megawatt comedic cast, it just isn't funny enough, it isn't zany enough, and it isn't even particularly violent enough. It's somehow bland.

Borderlands falls into a middling realm of 'blah', where you can slot it next to other releases on our metaphorical video-game-movie-comparison shelf, such as 2018's Tomb Raider, 2020's Monster Hunter and 2022's Uncharted.

The film follows the key beats of the games with vault hunters descending on Pandora, an alien planet, hunting for magical keys to open a mystical vault with untold power and treasures inside. To do this, a rag-tag bunch of misfits are forced to team up to find the daughter of the most powerful man in the universe.

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Fans of the games will delight in the perfect rendition of Claptrap, joyously voiced by video-game-movie mainstay Jack Black.

Yet the role feels like a wasted chance for Black to ad-lib and run wild with the dialogue or shine through some of his impassioned vocal gymnastics, which made Bowser so compelling and 'Peaches' such a bad mamma jam.

Instead, we get him pooping bullets. Literally.

There are also just too many stoic and heroic characters doing the same thing, which is made all the more odd when you have comedic powerhouses such as Kevin Hart (playing soldier Roland) and Jamie Lee Curtis as a jittery Dr Patricia Tannis.

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Hart's 5'5" stature, which is so often the punchline in his movies, is referenced once before he defaults to a bland heroic archetype. Beyond one moment of levity with Bobby Lee's Larry in a bar, there's little chance to let his natural charisma shine, which again feels like a waste of his talents.

Some levity comes from Ariana Greenblatt as lost, chaotic teen Tiny Tina, who befriends Florian Munteanu's near-mute psycho maniac Krieg. Surprisingly, Krieg gets some of the best lines as he bizarrely barks sudden responses in the background.

Rounding out the cast is Cate Blanchett's Lilith, who looks incredible. Her hair is a gravitational wonder and the costume looks like a fantastical interpretation of the game, even folding in small hints of the cel-shaded style that made the games so visually unique.

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Prime Video's Fallout managed to walk an incredibly fine line of emotional gravitas with surreal horrific humour that captured Bethesda's wasteland perfectly. And it feels like Borderlands could easily have leaned into the humour more, perhaps approaching the film similarly to the or the Guardians of the Galaxy series, with knowingly daft jokes pushing along the silly proceedings.

The film is released as a 12A, despite the games generally being fairly adult with swearing, violence, drugs and gore. Foul language is limited here, as are any spots of blood despite a lot of people being shot dead, which again feels like a wasted opportunity for horror director Eli Roth.

There's one moment Tiny Tina snaps a psycho's neck soundlessly at the side of the screen, making it hard not to feel like the film has been trimmed for a lower age rating.

Would more gore, sex and violence make the film better? No, of course not. But it does pose the question of whether there's more they could have done with it if they'd pushed the things nearer to the knuckle.

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Borderlands feels like a film for kids, but even if that's the case, that doesn't excuse the lack of humour and compelling characters, and those failings can't be outgunned by the strong visuals.

There are great moments, but they dip at points, with wobbly CGI and a distinct feeling of budget limitations holding them back from realising the full extent of the intergalactic neon-apocalyptic world.

Being a fan of the Borderlands games didn't add huge amounts of depth to the experience. It felt more like ticking off seeing those elements on-screen, with cameos from Mad Moxxi (Gina Gershon) and Marcus (Benjamin Byron Davis).

The ideal situation for video-game adaptations is to delight existing fans while translating the magic for newbies in a movie medium, all to help them understand what makes the games so special. Borderlands feels like it could have been an outrageous bombastic romp. Instead, it's more of a trudge through a noisy desert with some cosplayers.

Borderlands is in cinemas now.

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Editor-in-Chief -Digital Spy

Laurence Mozafari (he/him) is a multi-award winning journalist, editor, and presenter, currently Editor-in-Chief at Digital Spy, the UK's biggest TV and movies website.

Before that, he held roles as Editor, Deputy Editor, and Associate Editor focusing on news, social, and video.Laurence hosted the BBC Sounds podcast Obsessed with Peaky Blinders in 2019, as well as his own podcast production, Time of My Life, where he interviews fascinating elders about their life lessons, including Only Fools and Horses' Sir David Jason, Star Trek’s George Takei and Bridgerton’s Adjoa Andoh.
He was previously at Bauer Media working as Digital Editor of Heat magazine’s website, Heatworld.com, and has worked at and written for Sky, NME, Q magazine, Grazia, Closer, FHM and dedicated careers website GoThinkBig.

He secured a first-class BA journalism degree at Staffordshire University, along with several NCTJ qualifications, and now has 14 years' experience in digital publishing covering TV, movies, music, gaming, tech, showbiz, and travel.

Laurence has been a broadcasting contributor on television and radio, including KISS, Heat Radio, BBC Radio London, Radio 5 Live, and BBC Breakfast. He is also a visiting lecturer at various universities teaching journalism, including City, University of London, Nottingham Trent, Staffordshire University and London Metropolitan.

Laurence has won numerous awards in his journalism career, including the BSME Talent Award’s Best Deputy Editor, the PPA's 30 Under 30, and the New Editor and Editor of the Year at the AOP and BSMEs. He led Digital Spy to win PPA's Digital Content Team of the Year twice, along with the British Media Awards’ Brand of the Year in 2021.

Laurence joined the committee for the British Society of Magazine Editors in 2022. He has since hosted panels with CEOs of Immediate Media and the Media Trust at the PPA Festival, as well as presenting his own radio show on Green Man Radio at Green Man Festival in 2022. Laurence is also a Brits voting academy member. Laurence has been lucky enough to interview numerous celebrities, actors, and musicians throughout his career. Arnold Schwarzenegger loved his hair, Jimmy Carr loved his coat and Antonio Banderas gave a shout-out to his mum. Laurence has covered set visits for The Witcher on Netflix and Marvel’s Inhumans, he got Daisy Ridley to do a Chewbacca impression and loves Marvel, PlayStation, Glastonbury and craft beer.

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Borderlands video game movie fails to find Fallout's nuclear formula (2024)
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