The Borderlands movie lands on the border between good and bad

Say what you want about Borderlands, the venerable Gearbox Software game franchise about treasure hunters on the ruined alien planet of Pandora — it lives up to its title. Borderlands games find the places between places, whether that means the border between traditional roleplaying systems and skill-based shooter mechanics, or the border between good humor and gimmick.

Like many other game series of its size and age, this franchise is a relentless crosser of unlikely lines. Borderlands has been a narrative-based Telltale point-and-click adventure, a top-down iOS strategy game, and a high fantasy adventure. But with Lionsgate’s movie adaptation Borderlands, directed by Eli Roth and starring Cate Blanchett (Tár), Jamie Lee Curtis (Everything Everywhere All at Once), Kevin Hart (Jumanji), Jack Black (The Super Mario Bros. Movie), and Ariana Greenblatt (Barbie), the series tries to cross a frontier that has left even the biggest, baddest video game franchises stranded in the wastelands.

Yet even here, Borderlands has found the place between, which is impressive, but unfortunate. Borderlands the movie isn’t particularly good, but improbably, it isn’t particularly bad, either.

Blanchett anchors the movie as Lilith, a cynical bounty hunter who accepts a job from the head of Borderlands’ perennial corporate overlords, Atlas. It’s too lucrative to pass up, even though it’ll take her to the one place in the galaxy she never wants to see again: her homeworld, Pandora. (While Borderlands’ plot is bespoke, its lead roles are all characters lifted from the games.)

A few twists and turns of allegiances later, a momentarily allied group of misfits comes together, including runaway demolitionist Tiny Tina (Greenblatt), her protector Roland (Hart), eccentric scientist Tannis (Curtis), and Jack Black as Borderlands’ mascot, Claptrap the extremely annoying robot.

Borderlands isn’t a smart movie, but it isn’t meant to be. Roth and co-writer Joe Crombie are much more interested in moving snappily between necessary plot points and neat environments. The film never drags, and the sets — while noticeably enclosed, for a wasteland world — make for lively, engagingly staged action. There’s a palpable style to the movie’s version of Pandora, resting firmly on the immediately identifiable visuals of the Borderlands games.

That style isn’t limited to the locations. The costumes are among the best I’ve seen in terms of bringing true gonzo video game character designs to the screen. Everybody in the main cast has the distinct, instantly clockable silhouette of a character-based shooter avatar, and they stay perfectly consistent for the movie’s whole runtime. (Shout-out to Cate Blanchett’s asymmetrical wig — it’s a work of magic.) Daniel Orlandi (Logan) nails the unrealism of Borderlands’ sartorial style, and does it all without giving everyone the squeaky-clean corporate cosplay look of actors staffing an E3 booth. (See: Warcraft, the movie.) I still couldn’t tell you how it works.

Among the cast, Blanchett is the standout. She has a well-established preternatural awareness of the camera: In films from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring to Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, she’s been turning the basic job of “hitting your mark” into iconic cinema moments for decades. Borderlands proves she can do it in an action movie as well. Every move she makes in every shot of every action scene is as perfectly tuned to the camera’s eye as if there were a team of animators posing her — her silhouette is crisp, her movements are legible and rhythmic. She’s as cool as a human embodiment of the Cowboy Bebop opening. Hollywood, put Cate Blanchett in more action movies!

Problem is, you can tell that this clarity of action comes from Blanchett, not the crew, because she’s the only person in the movie who looks this good. Ultimately, the place where Borderlands most lets down its star and its source material is in its narrative cohesion, in the ability to give this story enough instead of almost enough.

The plot is a standard of the genre, ready to rub shoulders with “misfit heroes do good” winners like Guardians of the Galaxy or Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. (At least until a late-game reveal that isn’t so much a twist as a swerve, almost but not quite supported by any previously revealed information.) Roth and Crombie make a clear attempt to ground the story in the existing characters and have them root for each other, but it isn’t quite enough. This is a Dungeons & Dragons movie that needed a load-bearing 10% more emotional connection, or a lower-IQ Fifth Element that doesn’t quite give viewers a reason to care about the world-threatening stakes.

But on the other hand, if you’re looking for an afternoon of silly goofs, great costumes, fun action, and Cate Blanchett showing up to Work, you could do worse than Borderlands. A lot worse. Turning your brain off for a movie isn’t a bad thing when the movie is just designed to entertain. Borderlands is the one kind of movie that’s the hardest to get excited about: the kind that lands in the middle space between a project with its own strong identity, and a compromised adaptation trying to play to the masses. It’s tough to live in the borderlands.