Borderlands is a Guardians of the Galaxy ersatz [critique]

Eli Roth signs a soulless adaptation of the video game.

” I just wrote a first draft of the script years ago. Since then, it's been rewritten and uh… ''transformed'' “, Craig Mazin, screenwriter of the series, told us last year Chernobyl And The Last of Us. Indeed, there is no trace of his name in the credits of Borderlandsa cinematic transposition of the very funny video game from Gearbox Software studio. Too bad, because Mazin certainly had another angle in mind than that of the carbon copy of the Guardians of the Galaxy : the film by Eli Roth (Hostel, The Green Inferno, Thanksgiving…) actually follows the formula to the letter, a mix of action and humor with outsiders thrown into an adventure to the confines of space. Except that Roth doesn't have James Gunn's talent for writing endearing outsider characters…

Average blockbuster

It's all stereotypes in Borderlandslike its heroine, Lilith (Cate Blanchett), a badass bounty hunter with an itchy trigger finger, hired by a billionaire (Édgar Ramírez who is over the top) to find his daughter. Direction the chaotic planet Pandora, where a robot who does nothing but chatter (voiced by Jack Black), a seasoned mercenary (Kevin Hart), a teenager with a bloated ego (Ariana Greenblatt), a masked lunatic released from the asylum (Florian Munteanu) and a wacky scientist (Jamie Lee Curtis) are hiding pell-mell. Walking clichés that should provide all the comic material the film needs, but treated here with an incredible first degree. With the exception of a few visual gags (moreover the universe is very respectful of the game, perhaps even a little too much for the good of the project), the jokes rarely hit the mark.

Borderlands suffers above all from the absence of any dramatic stakes worthy of the name, and from a story remote-controlled by a MacGuffin of some kind – an ark abandoned by an ancient alien civilization, which will not be any more interesting once discovered. If the attempt to camouflage the flaws of the script with scenes of shootouts works for a while, boredom sets in as quickly as the bodies pile up. Eli Roth nevertheless puts his heart into it but seems to have forgotten along the way why he agreed to adapt the game… The very definition of the average blockbuster, never completely bad, simply devoid of taste or smell. And therefore quite incapable of justifying its own existence.

Borderlands is in theaters now. 1 hour 40 minutes.