Every summer there are one or two movies that looked promising only to turn out to be stupendous flops.
Borderlands is one of those movies.
It wasn’t tough to spot. Sometimes movie trailers for bad movies can still look good. It is possible to pull out a minute or two of a movie’s very best footage and cobble it into a preview that looks exciting. Sadly, Borderlands fell short of even doing that.
What we saw were action sequences of chases, stunts and explosions that were pretty run of the mill. We’ve seen a million sci-fi movies like this about a rag-tag team of mismatched heroes on some hairbrained mission to find something or free someone from the clutches of evil. At a glance, Borderlands is Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) with female protagonists. There is even a muscle-bound wrestler type character who is the counterpart of Dave Bautista’s Drax character in Guardians.
The references to other movies could constitute a drinking game, if you had plenty of liquor in stock.
Cate Blanchett stars as Lilith, a female Hans Solo hired ray gun character who is tough as nails and hot as hell with her punky Jello dyed hair and black, skintight outfit. To Cate’s credit, she pulls it off at the age of 55, which is like 25 in Hollywood years, thanks to make-up, cosmetic surgery, digital effects and whatever Hollywood studios do to keep their talent looking eternally young on the big screen.
Conversely, Jamie Lee Curtis also stars in Borderlands as Tannis, an elderly character who looks unabashedly old and world weary, with the exception of her cleavage. Her fans won’t care. She has opted to play her age (65) in many of her more recent films.
Rounding out the star power draw of Borderlands is Kevin Hart, playing the kind of over-the-top sidekick action hero that he has gravitated toward portraying in the movies. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) comes to mind. Once again, he’s the energized, irrationally fearless, borderline crazy, but ultimately likeable character that he plays so well.
Other star talent includes Jack Black as the voice of Claptrap, a R2D2-type robot who quips, nonstop throughout the movie --even occasionally singing his lines-- in a strained, failed attempt to add comedy relief. It’s pathetically bad.
Borderlands is the brainchild of writer/director Eli Roth whose earlier movies include Cabin Fever (2002), Hostel (2005), and The Green Inferno (2013). His venture into sci-fi, action adventure comes off as homage to other sci-fi classics that he’s enjoyed, such as the aforementioned Star Wars and Guardians of the Galaxy.
He even steals the famous holographic sequence from Star Wars when R2D2 plays back Princess Leia’s impassioned plea for help. The logic here seems to be that if you’re going to borrow, borrow big.
Borderlands is a movie that was apparently banking on the appeal of its bankable stars. But even bankable stars can’t save a movie with a weak script. Stock action sequences don’t help. And overriding all that is a sense that this is a movie that didn’t have much of a production budget left after the big-name stars got their paychecks. Everything seems to be on a budget, from locations to extras to costumes and wardrobe.
It begs the question of why the likes of Cate Blanchett, Jamie Lee Curtis or Kevin Hart would ever sign up for a movie like this. There have been other colossal examples of fine talent appearing in appallingly bad movies over the years.
One of the biggest was the outrageous, X-Rated movie Caligula (1979) that starred Malcolm McDowell, Peter O’Toole, Helen Mirren and John Gielgud, and was produced by Penthouse Magazine’s founder Bob Guccione. One wonders what could compel respected, successful stars like this to agree to appear in one of the most shockingly trashy movies ever produced.
Whatever the reason, established actors sometimes find themselves in projects that they probably wished they had never done. Borderlands fits that description. I can only hope that they got paid a lot.
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