In Eli Roth’s “Borderlands,” a cluttered caper flick based on the best-selling video game series of the same name, Cate Blanchett plays a trigger-happy bounty hunter who keeps killing the other characters midsentence before they can fill in the plot. Shoot first, ask questions never — even though the audience has questions of its own: What caused the delay that’s taken this big-budget movie three years to get released? And is it possible that Roth’s credited co-writer, Joe Crombie, who otherwise has no other screenplays or online presence, might be a pseudonym for someone who doesn’t want their real name on this haphazard script?
Like the original first-person shooter game, “Borderlands” is set on a junkyard planet named Pandora that was once a home base for an advanced alien species, but has since been overrun by violent marauders and women with formidable push-up bras. Blanchett’s Lilith was born here and begrudgingly returns under the employ of a tycoon (Edgar Ramírez) who’s hired her to track down his daughter, an unhinged teenager named Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt). To Lilith’s annoyance, her one-woman squad swells with new members: a sassy robot (voiced by Jack Black), an autistic xeno-archaeologist (Jamie Lee Curtis), a mostly mute meathead (Florian Munteanu) and a noble soldier (Kevin Hart). When Hart is playing the straight man, you know you’re watching a film that’s throwing everything at the screen.
The style is Chernobyl chic. Anything that can have spikes does have spikes — even the terrain. The scrapheap aesthetic is so maximalist that, at one point, our leads take a joyride in a dumpster. The film itself feels salvaged from the properties it aspires to bowdlerize, chief among them “Star Wars.” Key messages are transmitted as Princess Leia-esque holograms; Black’s robot spouts pessimistic survival statistics; Hart barges onscreen in a gothy Stormtrooper get-up that he immediately discards, sneering, “What a stupid helmet.”
You can see the jokes, but most of them don’t land. Still, there is some neat design work if you squint. The masks are pretty cool, like the ones worn by a handful of goons who sport glow-in-the-dark face coverings with eerie green slits, and a digital technology allows people to wear other people’s pixelated faces over their own. I enjoyed the cars that resemble mutant ab rollers and the stuffed bunnies that hide grenades. During one epic fight, the cinematographer Rogier Stoffers squeezes in a brutish and short tracking shot that swishes between comically inflated guns and scorching flame throwers. And Black’s robot absorbs so many bullets that he later has to expel them in a crude torrent like he’s auditioning for an interplanetary Imodium commercial.
Blanchett is forced to take a couple of tonal pivots that leave us feeing dizzy. Still, the two-time Oscar winner endures the nonsense by carrying herself like a warrior on a kitschy propaganda poster with her windswept, chili-pepper-bright coiffure capturing the digitalized light just so. In voice-over narration at the beginning, she drolly intones that the plot to come is “some wacko B.S.” We don’t disagree.
Borderlands
Rated PG-13 for rampant cartoonish violence and prominent bosoms. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters.
Read More: ‘Borderlands’ Review: Shoot First, Ask Questions Never
