‘Borderlands’ Review: Eli Roth’s Video Game Movie Reaches New Plateaus of Mediocrity

If you threw “Guardians of the Galaxy,” “Escape From New York” and “Fallout” into a blender, you would ruin your blender. It doesn’t matter if you tossed in DVDs or celluloid or hard drives, there’s just no way your blender will successfully mix those things together. And if you want proof — and you don’t want to ruin a perfectly good blender — watch Eli Roth’s “Borderlands,” a middling adaptation of the popular video game by GearBox, which can’t make this motley concoction work no matter how much, or possibly how little, it tries.

The original “Borderlands” video game didn’t have to worry too much about being narratively familiar because it had other positive qualities that compensated, like millions of potential weapon combinations and a distinct visual aesthetic. “This plot point is a lot like [insert movie or game here]” isn’t as much of a dealbreaker because the player can enjoy the experience of playing through the scenario for themselves.

Roth’s adaptation of “Borderlands” doesn’t have an interactive experience to fall back on, so all we get is an adaptation of the plot . An extremely liberal adaptation of the plot, like it got translated into a space alien’s language and then got translated back.

Cate Blanchett plays Lilith, a bounty hunter hired by Atlas (Edgar Ramírez), the head of the appropriately-named Atlas Corporation, to rescue his kidnapped daughter Tina (Ariana Greenblatt). Tina has been abducted by an ex-soldier named Roland (Kevin Hart), who was helped by a berserker, or “Psycho,” named Krieg (Florian Munteanu, “Creed II”). Lilith will have to track them down on Pandora, a planet full of violent outlaws, monsters and urine geysers — and yes, you did read that last part correctly.

Unlike the planet Pandora in James Cameron’s “Avatar” — which premiered a few months after the original “Borderlands” in 2009, so no foul there — this planet of Pandora is a bland and cheap-looking scrapyard. It turns out that somewhere on this hellhole there’s a secret vault that contains ancient alien treasures and technologies, so people from all over the galaxy have torn Pandora apart looking for it.

Lilith quickly learns that Tina, a teenager with an unlimited stockpile of exploding stuffed animals, is the key to finding and unlocking the vault. So she teams up with this ragtag group of misfits — and a wisecracking robot named Claptrap (voiced by Jack Black) and a historian named Dr. Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis) — to save Tina’s life, and also find the vault and keep its contents out of Atlas’ hands.

That’s a big cast of characters and the screenplay, credited to Roth and Joe Crombie, doesn’t know what to do with them. They crack wise, they fight each other, they fight faceless hordes and at the end, we’re supposed to think they care about each other, but heaven knows why. There must have been a lot of character development and bonding off-camera between scenes, because precious little found its way into the actual movie.

Jack Black ekes some chuckles out of Claptrap, an indestructible robot who’s programmed to follow Lilith around even though he hates doing it. Claptrap is what happens when you put C-3PO’s “woe is me” attitude into R2-D2’s utilitarian shell. He’s one of only two characters who stands out, and even then it’s because he reminds us of characters in better movies. (Come to think of it, “Borderlands” opens with a riff on the “Aren’t you a little short for a stormtrooper” bit from “Star Wars,” and maybe it wasn’t the best idea to remind us we could be watching better movies before this one’s plot even kicks in.)

The other actor who gets away with everything is Blanchett, who plays Lilith like an expensive action figure boasting dozens of dynamic poses. Blanchett doesn’t have to resort to kitsch, she’s playing a larger than life sci-fi antihero and she brings everything that entails to the screen, strutting and kicking ass even when nothing else in the film can match her swagger. Roth worked with Blanchett before and he knows how fun it is to watch one of cinema’s classiest actors do over-the-top action nonsense; “The House With a Clock in Its Walls” had her head-butting an evil floating Jack O’Lantern and exclaiming, “I hate pumpkins!” and the world is a better place for it. Nothing in “Borderlands” is nearly as sublime, but watching the two-time Oscar winner take a flamethrower to a sewer tunnel full of Jason Voorhees knockoffs is pretty entertaining too.

The biggest problem with Eli Roth’s “Borderlands” isn’t that it’s bad, it’s that it’s not interesting enough to be bad. It’s mass-produced pabulum. All the edges have been sanded down so it can be safe and mainstream, but they went too far and there’s almost nothing left. It’s technically a movie based on “Borderlands.” Not much else.

“Borderlands” hits theaters on Friday, Aug. 9.

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