Looks like rubbish video game movies are back on the menu boys!

The history of terrible video game movies is as long as it is depressing. Even as the game and film industries grow and evolve around them, this pocket genre universe has been treading the same stagnant water since Super Mario Bros and Street Fighter dropped the ball back in the nineties.

On the surface, it really shouldn’t be that hard, yet failure after failure has made it abundantly clear that video games and cinema just don’t jive together. That said, after decades of utter rubbish, the tide does appear to be turning.

Whether it’s a genuinely good indie game adaptation like Werewolves Within, relatively decent takes on icons like Sonic and Mario, or its new lease of life on television with Fallout and The Last of Us; things were finally starting to look up for the wider video game genre.

Until now, it seems.

On a mission to rescue the missing daughter of powerful corporate magnate Atlas (Edgar Ramírez), infamous bounty hunter Lilith (Cate Blanchett), reluctantly returns to her home, Pandora, the most chaotic planet in the galaxy. Forming an unexpected alliance with a ragtag team of misfits - seasoned mercenary Roland (Kevin Hart), feral pre-teen demolitionist Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), jacked ‘Psycho’ Krieg (Florian Munteanu), oddball scientist Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), and wiseass robot Claptrap (Jack Black). Together, these unlikely heroes must battle aliens, rogues, and dangerous bandits to uncover Pandora's most explosive secret.

As odd as it sounds, with all the positive strides video game movies have made in recent years, it’s actually kind of comforting to know that they are still able to produce a turd the size of Borderlands. Because, make no mistake, this isn’t just one of the poorest video game adaptations in recent memory, it’s up there with the worst movies of 2024 (so far, at least).

While Borderlands’ marketing is desperate to position itself alongside the likes of Guardians of the Galaxy and would have you believe that it accurately captures the chaotic energy of the game, in truth, it gets nowhere near either. With a complete misunderstanding of what made both these things so successful and so beloved, Borderlands is an extraordinarily weak effort that misses its mark by some considerable distance.

Despite how much it attempts to convince us otherwise, Borderlands is a limp, lifeless, painfully dull adaptation that clearly doesn’t know what it’s aiming for or what audience it’s aiming at. For fans of the game, there’s almost nothing for you here, while more casual fans will leave disappointed as everything on display has been done far better elsewhere.

Blessed with a colourful array of characters with strong, witty, well written personalities, the Borderlands game delivers so much for casual and hardcore gamers alike, and should, if treated well, offer a solid foundation upon which to build. It’s just a shame that this particular adaptation takes all that potential and launches it into the bin.

Painfully short on anything resembling the irreverent, off-kilter humour that became the games’ trademark, Borderlands is a mere shadow of its source material and an empty shell of a film that completely misunderstands what has made the franchise so popular for so long. It’s so often the issue with video game adaptations that they end up misinterpreting their source material and that’s very much the case here, as director Eli Roth’s tone-deaf approach totally misses the Borderlands boat.

We’ll probably never know what actually happened to Craig Mazin’s original script – a script that garnered much Hollywood hype not too long ago – however, it’s a crying shame that it never saw the light of day because what we’ve ended up with is nothing short of a travesty, and the fact that Mazin would end up removing his name from the finished film’s credits tells you all you need to know about the quality (or lack thereof) we’re dealing with here.

Quite frankly, whatever Eli Roth did to the script after taking over writing duties simply hasn’t worked and, together with his sub-par direction, turns what could’ve been a vibrant, funny, thrilling watch into a joyless, uninspiring slog. Whether it’s the painful stabs at humour or the flat, predictable plot, Roth has cobbled together a turgid mess of a movie and a Borderlands adaptation in name only.

Some of the film’s cast try their best – Cate Blanchett especially, who appears determined to make the most of the casting mess she’s got herself into – but it’s all to no avail. The characters themselves range from bland (Kevin Hart’s Roland) to blander (Edgar Ramírez’s painfully one-dimensional villain) to downright annoying (Jack Black’s patience-testing Claptrap), and there’s very little the combined star power of Borderlands’ ensemble can do to rescue things.

After a brief reprise in quality with Thanksgiving, Eli Roth is back to his old tricks as he, once again, highlights a complete lack of filmmaking nuance, vision, and application. Across the board, Borderlands feels depressingly flat. From the rote humour to the bland CGI to the by-the-numbers narrative, Roth has taken whatever energy there once was with this film and put a huge pin through it.

Of course, you can forgive a video game movie for having all the plot and character depth of a puddle if (and it’s a big if) the action can make up for it; however, this is, disappointingly, where Borderlands falls down the hardest.

Although some of the sets feel tactile and in keeping with the games’ visual aesthetic, they are rapidly swamped by an exceptionally bland green screen energy that sucks all the potential excitement out of proceedings. As a location, Pandora should be an intriguing and visually stunning environment for Borderlands’ action to play out in, however, what we end up with is an insipid, uninviting world that comes off like a cheap, lacklustre Guardians of the Galaxy knock off.

Things just happen without weight, consequence, or intrigue on this CGI-swamped, cardboard cutout of a setting, a factor that, without doubt, is Borderlands’ biggest crime. It just doesn’t excite or intrigue in any way, shape, or form and, ultimately, just isn’t that much fun at all.

Despite how hard it tries to convince you otherwise, Borderlands is a limp, lifeless, painfully dull turd of a movie. With uninspiring action, eye-rolling humour and a flat, predictable plot, this is what you’d get if you ordered Guardians of the Galaxy from Temu and undoubtedly one of the worst films of the year.