// 2024 ranked

It's the era of the videogame adaptation. Longtime franchises like Sonic and Super Mario are finally getting their due, indies like Five Nights at Freddy's are finding success thanks to young audiences, and prestige television studios are tackling big IPs like Fallout and The Last of Us. What these projects have in common are big fanbases and adaptation-ripe concepts, something Borderlands lacks in comparison. Borderlands 3 came out 5 years ago and sold 18 million copies, yet holds little relevance in gamer culture. Years in development hell means that Borderlands is coming out at possibly the worst time it could be. There are few Borderlands fans and the post-Covid general audience isn't large enough to carry this financially, and it's eyeballing a $10-15 million opening weekend off a $120 million budget. Good lord.

Borderlands is borderline offensive. It's boring. The identity of the games lies in childishly mature comedy and violence, something that a PG-13 rating cannot capture accurately. A good Borderlands film would have to be R rated; maybe something similar to James Gunn's The Suicide Squad. This is more like Guardians of the Galaxy if it was ordered off Temu. A bastardization of Borderlands IP meets the most overused quirky team tropes of the last decade. Remember how the Halo TV series was just someone's mediocre sci-fi script dressed up with the Halo IP? Same thing here. Eli Roth was a bad director pick for this and he hacked Craig Mazin's script to bits. Mazin literally asked for his name to be taken off this; an indicator of how messy Borderlands' production was. I think the editors had no clue what to do with what was filmed, often there are strange cuts or massive jumps in character coverage.

Very clear that the cast's hearts weren't in it. Cate Blanchett is bizarre casting for Lilith and just feels wrong in the role. Kevin Hart is also strange as Roland although he's hardly in the film. Ariana Greenblatt is fine as Tiny Tina and she might have been the highlight of the film if the script for her wasn't so bad. Jame Lee Curtis did not want to be there, and there's this hilarious shot of the whole group where she just looks tired and fed up. Jack Black as Claptrap was a HUGE miss. Not only does he sound nothing like the original character but he just has no comedic energy. And WHY wasn't Handsome Jack the villain in this? Like they are only going to get one chance to tell a Borderlands story and instead of doing one of the iconic ones, he's just fan fiction. Édgar Ramírez's Atlas is an all timer terrible villain, we're talking Madam Web Ezekiel levels of bad.

Imagine the visually-dull quarry setting of Deadpool & Wolverine's void and knockoff Borderlands characters scurry around in it for an hour and a half aimlessly. Unfunny, derivative PG-13 slop.