Level Down

Borderlands is a strange game to make a film adaptation of. Being a "looter-shooter" it is light on narrative and character with the joy of the game coming from unleashing ludicrous weapons upon hordes of enemies. In order to succeed the movie really needed to nail the wacky tone and look of the game's world while adding in sufficient story and character to make the audience care about what is going on. You could generously say director Eli Roth succeeds at half of one of these goals.

It may be harsh to pin the films shortcomings on Roth as it is unclear how much of this is the movie he signed up to make. Announced in 2015 and in active development since 2020 the script underwent multiple re writes and had Tim Miller come in for weeks of reshoots after Roth departed the project. The horror veteran certainly seems an odd fit for what ended up being a PG13 action comedy. There is defiantly a much better Borderlands movie that could have been made if he'd been allowed to unleash his full on blood and guts style. As it is, even Roths previous family move The House With a Clock in Its Walls had considerably more edge than this.

And boy could this movie have used a little edge. Things look great, the unique visual style of the games is represented about as well as live action can manage but everything else is just half baked. The action is derivative and feels small, the hit and miss juvenile humour of the games is less funny here and even the actors feel like they are at half throttle. Kate Blanchett is great to begin with as a cynical and over it bounty hunter but as her storyline becomes more and more cheese and forced emotion it becomes clear she is miss cast. Kevin Hart seems stuck between doing his usual comedy schtick and playing a leading action man. Jack Black's robot Claptrap is (for better or worse) one of the game's most memorable characters but this less self important version feels like a cheap Jack Black impression. Ariana Greenblatt comes off best, giving sass and kicking ass as deranged teen Tiny Tina but she is hampered by having to be as much plot mcguffin as character.

Said plot is nothing to write home about as a soldier, a bounty hunter, a psycho (big muscly guy who talks funny) and a motormouth robot on one wheel travel across a lawless planet with a kid to find a hidden vault that the kid is the key to opening while the evil corporation they stole the kid from pursues them. It's a perfectly serviceable means of getting the characters from A to B to C which would be fine for a film of this type if the character back and forth was enough to liven things up, sadly that's where Borderlands is really lacking. This cast should have been a hoot to hang out with but the dialogue is beyond lazy with awkward exposition and stilted banter. The characters want to be out there but with no straight man to play off none of them deliver.

Borderlands is a fairly sizeable miss, which is a shame because it's clear that the project had ambition but it needed more. More spirit, more individuality and more time and effort put into the script.

5 decent bits of loot from 10 crates.

Comments

Toxic Shock

The Toxic Avenger ambles his way into theatres some two years after the film was first shown at festivals. Strange that the movie had so much trouble finding a distributor given the presence of major names, relatively mainstream sensibilities (compared to the 80s original anyway) and the fact it's actually quite a bit of fun. Events take place in a fictional city inside a cartoonish, ultra-capitalist, crime-ridden caricature of 80s America, with locations called things like "Depressing Outskirts" and "Ye Olde Shithead District". Peter Dinklage is down on his luck janitor Winston Gooze, a widower with a step son who attempts to break into the headquarters of the mega-pharmaceutical company he works for when he discovers his gold level insurance doesn't cover treatment for his brain condition. Things go south and he is transformed into The Toxic Avenger, a mutated super human who sets about righting some wrongs in his crime ridden city. The film attempts t...

Love is a Battlefield

The Roses is technically a remake of 1989 black comedy, "The War of the Roses", but sticks far less closely to the source novel than its predecessor, with director Jay Roach and writer Tony McNamara bringing a drier, more understated tone to the humour. Add in pitch-perfect performances from Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman in the central roles and you have a fantastically fun hundred-odd minutes. After briefly seeing disillusioned architect Theo (Cumberbatch) and ambitious chef Ivy (Colman) first meet, the film skips us forward a decade to the now-married pair having abandoned their native UK to live their dream life in America. Theo is on the verge of revealing his architectural masterpiece while Ivy is cooking outrageously elaborate cakes in her role as stay-at-home mum to their two children. A freak storm ends up flipping their lives around and Ivy's chef career hits the big time while Theo holds down the fort at home and resentments slowly accumulate over th...

Weightwatchers Extreme

The Cut is a boxing movie with (apart from a brief opening sequence) no boxing in it. Instead it focuses on the equally brutal, but less visibly part of the sport, weight loss, as a former contender spirals into madness while trying to shed an insane amount of heft in order to secure a last minute return to the big time. Orlando Bloom is a boxer (he is never named during the film) who lost his one title shot and now runs a gym with his partner and trainer Caitlin (Catriona Balfe). He retains a reputation for being an exciting knockout specialist so when a title contender dies weeks before an upcoming Las Vegas showdown, scary promoter Donny (Gary Beadle) offers him the chance of a glamorous comeback. The catch? He needs to shed thirty two pounds (over two stone or fourteen kilos) in a week. Caitlin agrees to him giving it a go provided they do things by the book, but when traditional methods fail, John Turturro's Boz enters the equation and pushes Bloom way beyond the bounds of w...

Honey Doesn't

Honey Don't is the second film from the director/writer team-up of Ethan (one half of the brothers) Coen and his wife Tricia Cook. Like their previous effort, "Drive Away Dolls", it is wonderfully queer but lacks any of the sharpness and precise pacing that typifies a classic Coen brothers movie. Margaret Qualley is Honey O'Donahue (a name you will hear spoken a LOT over the course of the film), a private investigator in Bakersfield. She is essentially a classic noir gumshoe detective transported to sun-bleached, modern-day California. After a would-be-client dies, Honey begins an investigation that has her cross paths with Chris Evans's skeezy preacher and the mysterious French woman who represents his business partners. She is also attempting to provide support to her sister, who has a small army of children, including an eldest daughter who she is constantly at loggerheads with. All while working her way through the lesbian population of town, including embarki...

We are Living in a Material World

Materialists is, on the surface, a romantic drama-comedy about a New York matchmaker who faces a choice in her own love life. It has something more on its mind though, presenting a forensic examination of modern adult relationships and the incompatibility of expectation and genuine feeling. Dakota Johnson is Lucy, a specialist in matching together "elite" couples. For elite, read some of the worst people on Earth. Men who demand their partners have knockout bodies, adhere to strict weight limits and the younger the better. Women who will only consider the tall, rich and in one case, white. In Lucy's world marriage is a business deal and the ultimate match is the one who checks the most boxes. As a "voluntary celibate", she carries this philosophy into here every day life and has no interest in dating until she can find the rich man who will make husband material. The love cynic is a classic trope for the lead in a movie with this set up but there is much more...

Won't Somebody Think of the Children

Weapons is the sophomore effort from writer/director Zach Craggier and while his first film, "Barbarian", was well received, this feels like a clear step up. The film's fantastically eerie marketing campaign revolved around the movies central mystery, at 2.17 AM an entire classrooms worth of sixth graders get up out of bed and disappear into the night. It's a great hook but the story proper actually picks up a couple of months after the event and unfolds over a couple of days as the townspeople continue to deal with the fallout. The point of view shifts between a bunch of characters and time and space is given to fleshing out the small town details. This approach, combined with the sombre and eventually horrific goings on, gives the story a very Stephen King feel. It also works as a tension release, wiping the slate somewhat clean every time we switch perspective. The slight downside to the condensed mini series approach is that it lengthens the film with some segm...

Money and Masks

The challenge for Dumb Money is how to make a story about stocks interesting, especially when anyone interested either already knows what happened or can easily look up the events. The answer given here is to focus on some great characters played by grade A actors. The story is a simple one, albeit one seasoned with odd bit of financial jargon. Way back in pandemic times (2021) a low rung financial investor called Keith Gill led a Reddit driven movement to buy up stock in video game retail chain Gamestop, massively driving up its share price and giving investors a huge return. This sparks a backlash from the big finance institutions betting on the companies demise. Paul Dano plays Gill with Seth Rogan, Vincent D'Onofrio and Nick Offerman appearing as real life Wall Street investors alongside some made up "average Joe" characters portrayed by America Ferrera, Anthony Ramos and others. When every character is introduced we see their net worth, from the multiple billions ...

I Got Bombs But I'm Not a Bomber

Oppenheimer posed a tricky question for perennial hit maker Christopher Nolan. How do you make a three hour biopic of a scientist compelling enough to bring in big money? Turns out the answer is to not make a biopic at all. While J. Robert Oppenheimer is indeed the focus of the film it eschews any traditional biopic format, instead serving up what is essentially a heist or even sports movie wrapped up in a courtroom drama. This allows the director to indulge his favourite hobby of playing with time, as the story jumps between two different panel hearings while also covering Oppenheimer's early career and of course the work of the Manhattan Project. This approach works incredibly well with the three hour runtime flying by. In fact, if you go to see this in the cinema you might want to skip the large cola as there really isn't any time when little enough is happening to sneak in a toilet brake. Technically the film is outstanding. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, follo...

2023 at the Cinema

Its the start of a new year which means it's time to put some movies in their place. This is not a definitive list of the best films of 2023, only things I saw in the cinema are eligible (sorry Killers of the Flower Moon) so if you're wondering why your favourite/most hated flick isn't on here it's because I didn't see it on the big screen. Also, I reserve the right to have a completely different opinion about any and all of the entries in a weeks time. 50. The Enforcer Tedious, no action "thriller" about a criminal debt collector and his trainee street tough. Not sure if this snoozefest began with aspirations of being a no nonsense Taken clone or a serious redemption story but a plot driven by coincidence, awful dialogue and a 99 cents aesthetic make it feel like something from the depths of Amazon Prime rather than a cinema release. No idea how they wrangled Antonio Banderas into appearing in such a damp squib. 49. Saw X After attempting a detective m...

Dressed for Fun

The Naked Gun is a legacy sequel to the mad cap comedy franchise of the late 80's/ early 90's, with Liam Neeson playing Frank Drebin Jr, son of the legendary Leslie Neilson's detective from the original movies. Is big Liam quite as good at deadpan hilarity as Neilson was? Possibly not. Does this film ever completely match the highs of its predecessors? Probably not. Is it still very funny? Absolutely. The film arrives amid a cinematic landscape devoid of out of and out comedies, with laughs mostly relegated to one liners in action films or the silly sidekick in a romcom. Fortunately, from the moment a Girl Scout peels off her face to reveal a gurning Neilson, right through to a joke filled credits roll, The Naked Gun is interested solely in making you chuckle. Sure, there is a plot, involving a mcguffin literally named PLOT device and an evil tech mogul, played with deliciously deadpan malice by Danny Huston, but it's all about the gags. The comedy runs the gamut from ...

Dan Says its Alright

Search This Blog