Borderlands (2024)

Borderlands arrives as a one-hundred-million-dollar adaptation of a video game series beloved for its cel-shaded mayhem, and it departs as a cautionary tale about the perils of hiring an Oscar-winning actress and hoping the rest sorts itself out. Eli Roth directs with the enthusiasm of a man fulfilling a contractual obligation. Cate Blanchett collects a paycheck as Lilith, a bounty hunter summoned home to retrieve a corporate magnate's daughter. The plot is assembled from spare parts: a talking robot, a desert, a Vault. The film was reshot, re-edited, and stripped of its blood by producers who calculated that a PG-13 rating would sell more tickets. That calculation failed, but the reasoning behind it tells us everything about the enterprise.

The ensemble is genuinely multiracial and includes a woman in her sixties doing pratfalls, yet none of this is offered as a statement. The diversity mirrors the source material's roster, which is to say it exists without commentary. A teenage girl holds the key to unimaginable power, a setup that sounds like a feminist proposition until we notice the film treats it as standard action-franchise furniture. Edgar Ramirez plays a corporate villain with a private army, the faintest whiff of a class critique, never developed beyond a sneer and a drone. Characters called Psychos run screaming from an institution, but the film frames them as obstacles to be shot, not as a portrait of anyone's inner life. There is no romance, no identity, no cause. The wasteland is merely a wasteland.

Nothing here lectures. Nothing here argues. The film has no thesis beyond the hope that audiences would buy a ticket and then a video game. On the evidence, they did not. What remains is a vacuum of intent, a rare specimen that offends no one because it says nothing at all. We can almost admire the discipline.