Eli Roth’s Borderlands wastes an energetic Cate Blanchett on muddled shootouts and jokes that scarcely register. There is colour in the costumes, but little pleasure in spending 101 minutes with this underwritten company.
Borderlands wants the easy pleasure of a science-fiction adventure in which an ill-matched group argues its way through danger. Eli Roth directs as though keeping everyone busy will make them interesting, but the shooting and wisecracks do not conceal how little there is to care about. It is a poor action comedy, with an energetic Cate Blanchett badly let down by the material. The opening exposition gets us off to a weary start.
The screenplay by Eli Roth and Joe Crombie has difficulty making its explanations clear, then expects us to invest in people it has barely established. Information arrives without giving the characters enough purpose, and the jokes do little to distinguish them from one another. Exposition can be painless when somebody has a reason to resist what they are being told. Here it feels like preliminary work that the finished film should have done for us.
Cate Blanchett at least makes Lilith’s readiness to fire a gun seem like a choice somebody has made. Her commitment to the action gives the film occasional energy, and there is pleasure in watching a performer take such unpromising material seriously. Kevin Hart, as Roland, and Jack Black, voicing Claptrap, fare worse with characters that give their comic abilities little use. Ariana Greenblatt has energy as Tiny Tina, but too much of the comedy depends on loudness. The cast cannot make the group feel close simply by being kept together.
Evan Henke and Julian Clarke’s editing makes the shootouts particularly wearing. The cuts do not give us a secure sense of where anyone is in relation to anyone else, so the danger is difficult to judge. We were bored by the fighting because we kept having to work out what was happening before we could care about it. An action comedy should not make keeping track of its action such a chore.
Rogier Stoffers’s cinematography does offer colour, and it would be unfair to call every image lifeless. Yet the busy frames rarely give the eye a useful place to settle, a problem compounded by the clutter of Andrew Menzies’s production design. Daniel Orlandi’s costumes provide some welcome playfulness, even when the characters wearing them do not. There are things here worth looking at. Too often they are competing for attention inside a scene that already has trouble making itself understood.
Steve Jablonsky’s music does not make these thinly written encounters any more involving. A score has limited means of rescuing a scene when nobody in it has been given anything interesting to want or say. Against the ordinary standards of an ensemble science-fiction comedy, the shortfall is plain: the squabbling should be funny, and the growing attachment should make the danger matter. Here we spend too much time waiting for either to happen.
Even at 101 minutes, the film drags between its brief bursts of energy. The performers need space to build relationships, and repeated gunfire keeps taking it away. Bright costumes and a willing lead are meagre compensation for an evening spent trying to find a reason to care about the rest of the company. If Cate Blanchett is the attraction, choose something that gives her more to do.
