The Borderlands film is the most recent video game to film adaptation to arrive, with a fairly stacked cast in Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis, Edgar RamÃrez and Jack Black, to name a few.
It officially releases tomorrow, on August 9, 2024 but the reviews as it always is the case have already arrived from a variety of critics, and according to those reviews and the film’s whopping score of 33 on Metacritic, it seems like the film chose to honour the old days of film adaptations of video games. You know, the days when they were all just really bad.
IGN gave the film a 3/10 and called it “A tutorial on how not to make a video game movie,” among other things like “abysmal.” Variety said that the film “doesn’t have half the attitude or style its cyberpunk ad campaign might suggest.”
The Hollywood Reporter called director Eli Roth’s storytelling “messy” with its anxiety-ridden focus on always moving towards the next action sequence while Looper simply told movie goers “Don’t waste your time on this one.”
Regarding any positives about the film, the few things mentioned in multiple reviews were Jack Black’s performance as ClapTrap and the set design, which even the more negative reviews still singled out to be impressive.
All jokes about old video game to film adaptations aside, it’s disappointing to see the Borderlands film miss the mark in such a big way, but perhaps it can serve as a continued lesson for Hollywood.
Simply adapting any big game franchise isn’t the surefire path to profits executives might think it is.
Source – [IGN, Variety, Looper, The Hollywood Reporter, Metacritic]