Borderlands was a movie that was shoved in my face. I don’t think any real people were particularly excited for it and yet the marketing was rather aggressive. Especially if you went to SDCC, they were all over the place. Now my husband gave me a little insight as he is a huge video game nerd and I am not. Apparently most video game to movie adaptations are truly terrible, and I firmly believe that. This is just another casualty.
First of all, casting Kevin Hart is an immediate film red flag. He’s not funny and he can’t act, how he keeps getting work is beyond me. So knowing that he was in the film already made me not want to watch it.
Right off the bat it feels like it really wants to be Guardians of the Galaxy. Tone wise and it seems in structure as well that this film desperately wants to capture that magic, it fails to do so.
All of these jokes are falling really flat. They feel really forced, and it really feels like a baby's first comedy routine. It wants to be funny so bad but every joke they’ve made so far is predictable and not even a little entertaining.
The narrating as we are watching these things happening is not only lazy but it's bad storytelling. It feels like one of those parody movies circa 2010s. Even the cinematography feels like it's supposed to making fun of action movies. The coloring is SUPER over saturated and it is making everything look really plasticky.
I suppose this might be intentionally campy but there is a pretty thick line between campy and parody and this movie doesn’t seem to know what side of that line it wants to be on.
God the practical effects look sooooooo bad. I’m willing to bet just about none of this is practical because it does not look even remotely believable.
Please tell me the video game is not this stupid…this might be the dumbest movie that came out this year. Look Argylle was intentionally campy and it executed it well. It was a hilarious satire on spy movies…this feels like it wants to be satire of something but it's got nothing to say. That’s how over the top the filmmaking feels. All of these weapons and costume pieces look like plastic. I know cosplayers that could do better than whatever this is.
The whole final sequence was comically bad. They spent so little time building any relationships or developing any emotional through-line that when we get to the climactic fight it was so very underwhelming. Also our big bad is just not that intimidating. There was also a lot of exposition in what should have been the emotional moments which really took away from them. None of these relationships actually mean anything. This movie is a whole lot of nothing, it's so hollow but it thinks that it's really doing something which really just makes it so much worse.
Borderlands is an incredible waste of time. None of the performances feel believable, they try to have some kind of emotional core but it just isn’t there. The jokes are derivative and unfunny. The visuals look incredibly fake, plastic, and like they spent all of $10 on them. The story is extremely boring and the structure is quite repetitive (that would be the problem with adapting video games as they are by nature repetitive). My recommendation would be to not watch the movie, it is no more than a 3/10, and it's only points are awarded because I did sit through worse movies this year.
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Alexandrea Callaghan
Certified nerd, super geek and very proud fangirl.
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