Taylor Leverage’s review published on Letterboxd:
Cate Blanchett looks like she's plotting different ways to dismember her agent. That's the cold, uninterested stare of someone out for blood.
Just a bland, joyless mess; the Borderlands movie only seems to exist in order to balance out the karmic universe after all the acclaim that the Last of Us and Fallout adaptations received. Without his trademark gore to coast on, director Eli Roth just sort of weightlessly glides through a very plastic, painless plot about moving from point A to point B with vaguely heroic antiheroes spouting generic dialogue. The worldbuilding drops so many references to the game series through place names and characters, but doesn't feel the slightest shame in completely rewriting those characters and the story beats they go through, then replacing them with an incredibly disjointed, poorly paced narrative and inconsistent personalities. There's no reason to care about anything happening on screen, the protagonists virtually never run into any setbacks, no member of the cast seems enthusiastic about being a part of the production, and there isn't an ounce of personality to anyone shown on screen, which is pretty noticeable given that it's based on a video game series that is all about personality. Everyone involved in the film seems to be counting the minutes until they can go home, the story isn't a guilty pleasure, it's just poorly made.
I love Jack Black and all, but if all you need is dialogue, why not make the guy that voices the talking robot the same guy that voices him in the games? It's not like R2-D2 where George Lucas had to cram a tiny dude into a shiny, beeping garbage can.
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