Sometimes, the problem with forgettable movies is that everyone forgets they ever happened.

Take, for instance, The House with a Clock in Its Walls. Nobody remembers that movie. Nobody cares about that movie. Nobody remembers Eli Roth made that movie. Hell, even at the time, nobody knew or cared that Eli Roth made that horror movie for kids.

And yet, because everybody naturally forgets about that crucial intermediary step in Roth’s career, we keep making the mistake of thinking that he’s still the filmmaker he was back in 2007. Sorry, folks, but he’s not the filmmaker who made the Hostel movies. He’s not the guy who slaughtered Nazis for Tarantino. That guy is dead and gone.

Don’t believe me? Just look at the old Grindhouse trailer for Thanksgiving and then look at the full Thanksgiving released in 2023. Take a good long look at what everyone expected, and what we ultimately got. Even now, based on the relative success of Thanksgiving (2023) and the groundswell for the upcoming sequel, I don’t think we’ve completely accepted that we’re never getting the trashy gory grindhouse film we were promised over fifteen years ago. Because Eli Roth is no longer capable of making that film.

This is one of many reasons why alarm bells went off when I first saw the ads for Borderlands. The other two big ones were the obvious attempt at aping Guardians of the Galaxy, and the bafflingly miscast actors. Then again, of course the trailer looks like a soulless GotG ripoff — the trailer always shows you the movie the studio wishes they had!

But Cate Blanchett as a bounty hunter with attitude? Jamie Lee Curtis in a space opera? Sounds weird, but they’re great actors and I’d be a fool to underestimate them.

Kevin Hart, on the other hand? And he’s playing the straight foil? Yeah, that’s gonna suck.

Sure enough, just as it looked like Hollywood had finally cracked the code and given us some video game adaptations we could be happy with, Lionsgate laid a catastrophic bomb. Not the worst in history (nobody’s displacing John Carter anytime soon, alas), but very likely the worst of the year. And gods have mercy, I had to see it for myself. On Discount Tuesday, though — I’m not a complete idiot.

We lay our scene in the distant future, on the inhospitable faraway planet of Pandora. No, not that one. This one is a barren desert planet, allegedly the last repository of technology left behind by the extinct alien race that pretty much built the galaxy. Legend speaks of a Vault they left behind on Pandora, but nobody’s ever found it. So naturally, the planet became overrun with criminals, degenerates, and delusional capitalists camping out to try and find the Vault.

Enter our antagonist (Atlas, played by Edgar Ramirez), CEO of the transparently evil Atlas Corporation. And his “daughter” (Tina, played by Ariana Greenblatt) is supposedly capable of opening the Vault. (It’s a long bullshit story, I won’t go into details.) The plot begins in earnest when one of Atlas’ hired guns (Roland, played by Hart) kidnaps Tina and escapes.

Enter our protagonist. Lilith (Blanchett) is a bounty hunter hired by Atlas to retrieve Tina. Why is Lilith hired when Atlas has his own massive police force that gets sent in anyway? Never explained! Though at least it’s an excuse for Lilith to go back to her native Pandora and confront her family issues over the mother (Haley Bennett) that abandoned her searching for the Vault.

Rounding out the cast, we’ve got Florian Munteanu as Krieg, a friendly hulking psychopath who gets freed along with Tina; Jamie Lee Curtis playing Tannis, the galaxy’s foremost expert on the Vault; Jack Black voicing Claptrap, the robot comic relief sidekick; and Gina Gershon in a brief but welcome appearance as the owner of a brothel.

Before going any further, I want to state emphatically that I’m not picking up any malice here. This doesn’t feel like it was made with any spite towards the audience or the source material. Everyone on both sides of the camera is clearly doing the best they can.

That is the sum total of everything positive I can say about the movie.

Where do I even begin with this fucked-up production? The script began with writer Craig Mazin, though the script eventually passed through the hands of Eli Roth, Juel Taylor, and Tony Rettenmaier before shooting started. And that was before Zak Olkewicz came on board to write new pages for reshoots. Ultimately, Mazin requested his own name taken off the project, and the only two credited writers are Eli Roth and Joe Crombie. I hasten to add that Joe Crombie is such a nobody that Variety (who should certainly know of such a person) had to confirm with Mazin himself that it wasn’t a pseudonym.

Oh, and did I mention there were reshoots? Yeah, principal photography wrapped in 2021, but there were two weeks of reshoots in 2023. And Eli Roth was busy shooting Thanksgiving (2023), so Tim Miller had to step in and direct the reshoots. At roughly the same time that the project swapped composers, I might add.

With all this going on, little surprise that the movie is a fucking mess. The plot is held together by excessive voice-over narration, pathetically bad ADR, and the audience’s suspension of disbelief. Greenblatt visibly fluctuates in age. The climax is outrageously one-sided and rife with shallow CGI. In fact, the CGI throughout is pretty lackluster and the action is just plain boring.

Cate Blanchett is a genius at what she does, but she’s stuck playing a role written for an actor half her age. Greenblatt is obnoxious from start to finish. Munteanu plays a one-dimensional character who wears a mask at all times, so he might as well have been replaced with a stuntman. Jamie Lee Curtis is wildly out of place in a role that doesn’t play to her strengths in any way. Edgar Martinez is too bland to play a pulp villain. The very notion of Kevin Hart as an elite badass soldier is more ridiculous than any joke he’s ever told. Even in a speaking cameo role, casting Haley Bennett in a movie is like writing a book with Lorem ipsum.

But then we have Jack Black as Claptrap, such a worthless and unfunny CGI mascot sidekick that he left me crying and begging for Jar Jar goddamn Binks. The problem with this character is that he really is genuinely trying to be helpful, but he’s so brainless and incompetent and incessantly talkative that he wears out his welcome in no time flat. But the thing is, Claptrap’s whole deal is that he’s a robot specifically built to be indestructible.

The upshot is that Claptrap was specifically built for the purpose of physical comedy. Unfortunately, he’s exclusively a CGI creation, and physical comedy doesn’t really work unless the character is… y’know, physical. More importantly, the character is annoying enough that I hated having him around, and yet he’s so sincerely trying to be helpful (i.e.: sympathetic) that I got no pleasure out of watching him get beaten around. In short, the slapstick doesn’t work because I’m watching Claptrap suffer and I feel nothing.

This is emblematic of the “comedy” throughout this movie. The filmmakers can’t seem to make up their minds about what exactly is funny or why it’s funny. In turn, this is part of a much bigger problem: These filmmakers were so badly trying to make Guardians of the Galaxy, but with no cognizance of what made that movie work.

See, the Guardians are a dysfunctional team of fuckups. They are failures. They are misfits and outcasts, destructive to themselves and others. This is why it’s funny and/or heartbreaking when they tear each other apart, and why it feels so great to see them band together for the greater good. Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was a successful GotG ripoff because it was made by filmmakers who understood this. The filmmakers of Borderlands do not.

These filmmakers never have the guts to come right out and say that these characters are failures. Hell, one of the characters is the prophesied Chosen One who will open the Vault, and that’s about as far removed from the Guardians as it’s possible to get. We never get that moment when all the main characters come together to confront their flaws and failures as a found family. We never get that moment when every single one of them plays an indispensable part in saving the day. We never get that uplifting and empowering moment that rewards and celebrates the main characters for being “undesirable”.

Instead, pretty much all of the character development goes to Lilith. Which in turn means that we’re left with a flimsy Monomyth retread. Nowhere near good enough.

Moreover, because the film is so compulsive (and yet ineffective) in its portrayal of the main cast as stone-cold badasses, we already know well in advance that none of these characters are dying. The movie completely and totally fails to sell the idea that any main character death is going to stick. Not only does it make the action scenes hopelessly boring, but it robs a lot of power from dramatic character scenes as well.

On one last miscellaneous note about how this movie is an imbecilic GotG wannabe, they couldn’t even get the needle-drops right. None of the songs are showcased in a badass or iconic way. And of course we don’t get anything like Star Lord’s signature Walkman, which gave the songs an emotional heft with that connection to the protagonist. Without that, why the hell are we even listening to these classic songs?

Borderlands is an abject failure. Practically every single actor was hopelessly miscast. The comedy is misguided, the action is just plain boring, the CGI is flimsy, the themes are broken, the plot is ramshackle… it’s just bad. It’s depressing. It’s embarrassing.

With all of that said, I can’t find it in me to hate the filmmakers for it. The blame for this one goes to the producers and the studio execs who made this laughably misplanned production into an unsalvageable clusterfuck. Maybe it was Avi Arad, the overrated past-his-prime POS. Maybe someone at Gearbox or 2K got cocky and figured out the hard way that they didn’t know how to make a movie.

Regardless, this movie got fucked — and fucked hard — by somebody with no idea of what they wanted to make except money. I’m honestly kind of grateful that this movie bombed so hard, because that’s how it deserves to be remembered. We can’t let this one fade into total obscurity like The House with a Clock in Its Walls did. We need to remember this movie with the clear lesson that this is the trajectory of Eli Roth’s career. I’m not saying he’s cooked or washed up quite yet, but he sure as hell isn’t the director of Hostel anymore. Deal with it.