Jamie
There is always the tenuous tightrope we walk as we pursue four appropriate BMT Lives in a year. We want bad movies that are clear BMT qualifiers (like Madame Web). But we also don’t want them to be so bad that they aren’t fun. We want fun bad movies (like Madame Web). But they also have to be big and bold. They gotta have stars (like Madame Web). They also gotta say something about film and where it’s going. It’s gotta have some cultural cache that we can really chew on (like Madame Web). And you gotta be able to meme it… well maybe that’s a soft requirement. But maybe being able to think fondly about the crazy sunglasses one character wears at the end of the film is a positive… theoretically of course (like Madame Web). Anyway, I’m hoping Borderlands fits the bill and isn’t another Keeping up with the Joneses (the what?) Exactly.
To recap, Lilith is recruited The Expendables style to find and return Atlas’ daughter Tina on the planet Pandora. Pandora is not only the planet where it’s been long rumored that a “Vault” exists that contains immense power (attracting hunters from all over), but is also Lilith’s home. Anyway she arrives on the planet and yada yada yada she finds a robot Claptrap programmed to follower her, Tiny Tina hiding out, and a couple other misfits, Krieg and Roland, who have decided to keep Tina safe and specifically away from Atlas (this is literally yada yada yada’d in the film, so don’t worry about it). Turns out she was genetically modified to be able to find the Vault and Atlas just wants her so that he can use her to find it. Thus begins the hunt. They find the woman who raised Lilith after her mother died, Dr. Tannis, and with her help they locate the keys needed to direct them to the vault. This involves a big ol’ battle through some maniacs and teleportation and similar very exciting things. At this point Lilith decides not to give Tina back to Atlas, but there is a classic misunderstanding and Tina and the rest go off without Lilith for the vault. Ultimately they find the vault, but it turns out that it was Lilith the whole time who was the key (what a twist!). A big battle ensues and Atlas demands that Lilith open the vault for him or he will kill Tina. She obeys, but using her vault powers as the Firehawk (ooo) they trap him in the vault. Now in her true form as the hero of Pandora, Lilith and her new family celebrate with the citizens of the plant. THE END.
You could separate this film into two pieces. The first half is basically junk they needed so that they didn’t start with a fifteen minute text crawl or voice over. It’s cobbled together from reshoots and montages. Me and Patrick looked at each other in disbelief at what we were witnessing because we had paid for a movie. What we were seeing resembled a wikipedia synopsis page more than a movie. The second half at least was a movie. A very predictable one, but something where a robot said jokes, crazy action sequences were shown, and a MacGuffin was pursued. So you have a complete zero for maybe ⅓ of a film and then a 4 for the other ⅔, which comes out to 8/3. That’s my rating. Anyway, I think the only other thing I want to specifically mention is I liked Jack Black’s robot character. He was funny (as opposed to Kevin Hart for some reason) and Cate Blanchett came off fine, but Jamie Lee Curtis was terrible in this. I can already feel this erasing from my brain.
Hot Take Clam Bake! I think Lilith and Roland are going to make it in the long haul, everyone. What’s that? Roland and Lilith didn’t smooch at the end of the film? I just imagined it? Whaaaaaaaa? I mean, didn’t anyone else notice the sparks flying between Cate Blanchett and Kevin Hart? I was having flashbacks to watching Fifty Shades Darker in the theaters. Hooooo weeeeee. Hot Take Temperature: Firehawk.
Patrick?
Patrick
‘Ello everyone! *gif of me looking confused as a clip from earlier in the film is edited into a scene later in the film in a non-sensical manner* Let’s go!
The good? I mean, if you are looking for dumb fun the movie is something that is entertaining on, for example, an airplane. There are almost no stakes, everything is supremely predictable, and there is the perfect audience approved ratio of action to exposition.
The bad? Everything else. The beginning is almost completely incomprehensible. There is some stuff when Blanchett first arrives on Pandora which is very very clearly reshoots, specifically a strange voiceover sequence. In the sequence you see her talking to some Mad Max-esque children and I was like “what the hell is happening here”. Then twenty minutes later Blanchet frees a bunch of Mad Max-esque kids from a truck and they run off and it is like … oh, I see, they shot a whole bunch of stuff which really really didn’t work, and so they cut it all into a montage to just get Blanchet from her arrival on Pandora to the point where she meets Jack Black-bot. But they had to have an explanation for her getting the truck later on, so that was left in even though it is incredibly obvious bits of it was wildly out of order at that point.
I guess I’m saying you can see the seams of this movie. People are barely acting on the same stage. Apparently Jack Black did the voiceover for the robot like years ago. The reshoots were assuredly done with only Blanchet involved. If you power through that first thirty minutes though the end is kind of dumb fun with a few fun action set pieces.
The film though … I can’t see it as anything but lazy, and that is almost never fun. You need to be earnestly thinking you are making a good movie. Unfortunately the actors and director all probably knew the whole thing was a mess from the beginning and so nothing ends up being fun. It is mostly just sad and tragic.
If you want a highlight as to why AI analysis of movie data is somewhat amusing in the abstract, here is the quite unexpected interaction I had about the Borderlands poster. I asked it a simple question: how many characters from the Borderlands movie are featured on the poster. I fully expected it to either say 5 (because the robot doesn’t really look like a character in the poster, another character is sitting on it), or 6 (because there are six names at the top). But instead it said seven. The interaction went like this: “Name the 7 characters” Proceeds to name the six characters. “That’s only six” Oh sorry, there are seven names at the top of the poster. “There are only six names at the top of the poster” Oh sorry, it’s because there are seven characters in the image. “Who is the seventh?” A character called King who is in the video games and I don’t know if he’s in the movie, but he might be … The most normal of all AI interactions.
Anyways, Setting as a Character (Where?) for the alien planet of Pandora. Huuuuuuuge MacGuffin (Why?) for The Vault which contains something completely unknown but definitely awesome that everyone wants for sure. And Worst Twist (How?) for the realization that, shocker, it was Cate Blanchet all along who was the super secret key to everything. This movie was almost unwatchable, bland, and dumb looking, I think it is Bad.
Learn all about video games probably in the Quiz. Cheerios,
The Sklogs
Bad Movie Twins 