The Most Brutal ‘Borderlands’ Reviews Are Funnier Than the Film Itself

According to critics, Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black and Jamie Lee Curtis couldn’t save Borderlands from being so bad that it’s even bad for a video game movie.

Ever since the genre first took off in the 1990s, movie adaptations of popular game franchises have long been the bane of serious film critics and a boon for giant studios in search of a summer box-office success. Though 1993’s Super Mario Bros., the first live-action video game adaptation in Hollywood history, failed on both a critical and commercial level, films such as Street Fighter (1994) and Mortal Kombat (1995) proved that a cheesy, over-the-top and poorly-acted video game movie could turn a respectable profit while simultaneously pissing off Roger Ebert so bad that he would soon declare war on video games themselves.

As such, when Lionsgate handed Hostel director Eli Roth $120 million to turn the crass and colorful first-person shooter series Borderlands into a star-studded feature-length film, they probably figured that the movie would be another critically despised but commercially viable cash-in to continue the proud legacy of all the half-assed adaptations that came before it. 

Well, ahead of tomorrow’s wide release, Borderlands has already finished the first half of the job.

“It’s not a movie for critics, as the saying goes. Nor is it suitable for consumption by most gamers, film lovers or 99 percent of carbon-based life forms,” David Fear wrote in a Rolling Stone review with the tagline, “We’d say it’s the worst video game movie ever — but tha’'s way too limiting.” Fear continued, “You seriously wonder if the sole purpose of Borderlands is to make every other video game adaptation look a thousand times better in comparison.”

Fear’s assumption that gamers would react no more positively to Borderlands than general audiences seems to be correct. The video game website IGN was among the most vicious of outlets to review the film, writing that the adaptation of a famously stylish and aesthetically unique game series is “one of the ugliest studio releases you’ll see this year. Even in IMAX, Pandora’s dusty digital backdrops resemble pixelated vomit.” Reviewer Matt Donato concluded that Borderlands “is an abysmal waste of a beloved franchise that takes a kooky band of murderous misfits and drains the life out of their first adventure together.”

Many reviewers pointed out that Roth clearly attempted to recreate some of the quippy outlaw chemistry that made the Guardians of the Galaxy series a success despite having no idea how to write witty banter or direct charismatic performances. The Daily Beast's Nick Schager wrote that, compared to its obvious inspiration, Borderlands is “merely a skeleton of superior ancestors,” lamenting that “writer/director Eli Roth’s fiasco is so drearily routine and slapdash that even an A.I. would deem it too plagiaristic.”

However, a few writers recognized that Borderlands isn’t without slight merit. Even some of the most ruthless of reviewers acknowledged Blanchett’s best efforts to elevate Roth’s script to the level of watchability in her role as Lilith, though the critical community found little else to praise about Borderlands besides its mercifully manageable 102-minute runtime. “Lilith so easily outclasses everything around her that Borderlands is that rare would-be blockbuster where you wish the main character could get her own standalone feature, just so she can escape this meager adventure,” wrote Screen Daily's Tim Grierson.

With such widespread disapproval, Borderlands has a good chance to go down as the worst-reviewed video game movie in history, a title that has ample and formidable competition. But, if there’s one constant in the history of critically despised video game adaptations, it’s that the Rotten Tomatoes score rarely corresponds with the box office totals — those could be even lower.