Movie Review: Borderlands

I have been playing Borderlands for eight years. More precisely, I've been playing Borderlands 2 and the Pre-Sequel; the other games in that family--Borderlands 1, Borderlands 3, Tiny Tina's Wonderland--are absolute crap. In the case of Borderlands 3, I consider it unplayable because the fonts are so small. For whatever weird reason, the normally incompetent Gearbox made a masterpiece with Borderlands 2 and the Pre-Sequel.
 
My point is that Gearbox, the game developer, is an awful inconsistent mess. They never managed to capitalize artistically or commercially off the success of Borderlands 2, so I had low expectations for this movie. For instance, you'll notice that David Eddings isn't in the movie to voice Claptrap. Why? Because the Gearbox CEO didn't want to pay him more than union scale (on a previous project) and it escalated to the CEO Pitchford assaulting Eddings at a Marriot Marquis--allegedly. A former Gearbox lawyer, Wade Calendar, sued Pitchford for all kinds of malfeasance, including giving himself a $12 million bonus. So, in my mind, I see Pitchford as this acrimonious ass with an ego the size of a planet whose antics poison Gearbox productions. Pitchford still runs Gearbox, so yes, this movie is a turd.
 
The first thing to note is that they pushed the age of all characters by a solid twenty years or more. Tanis, played by Jamie Lee Curtis (65) is in her late thirties or early forties at most in the game. Lilith is the game's cheesecake, smoking hot, done up in fan-boy anime style. She is the uber-hot siren; her character is literally called a siren. So a 55-year-old Cate Blanchette is a completely different character at a completely different stage of life. Moxie, the over-sexualized barmaid tech-wizard mother of Scooter and Ellie, is played by Gina Gershon who is 62. I was pleasantly surprised to say she made it work well.
 
So even though Ms. Gershon can deliver a smoking-hot Moxie and make all sexagenarians proud, my point is that the vibe of the whole crew is severely aged. This is no youthful crew fighting the good fight, it's a bunch of hardened, tired, sexless grandparents just trying to survive.
 
And, hey, if they made it work, I'd be noting how clever they were in their adaptation, not regaling you with tales of Gearbox incompetence.
 
They decided to write this movie about the events before or concurrent with Borderlands 1. They rewrote a lot of backstory. Most significantly, they invented a prophecy that said only a 'daughter of Iridian' could open the vault. Why? So they had an excuse to throw Tiny Tina in the crew. Most action movies avoid dragging a 12-year-old girl through deadly gunfights, but Tiny Tina is the most popular character of the franchise, so they needed an excuse to throw her into this flick. While they were at it, they made her sane, removing all the fun from her character. In the games, Tina's parents were murdered in front of her, graphically, by a psycho named Fleshstick; that drove her insane and set her on the path of becoming a bomb maker. Explosives took one of her arms. So, in the movie, we have a mostly sweet young girl possessed of all her limbs and sanity with no role to play. Boring.
 
And I get it, you didn't all play Borderlands and roughly couldn't give a crap about the fidelity of the movie to the game franchise. I don't exactly disagree, but my point isn't so much about fidelity to the franchise, but to point out how much they bent the characters in the name of commerce. Tina was, as Marcus would call her, "a little psychopath", brilliantly voiced by Ashly Burch. She was magic and they destroyed that magic in pursuit of commerce. Everyone loves Tina, so how can't you put her in the movie? Yeah, I agree, but put Tina in, not some milquetoast approximation of her who is nothing more than living luggage.
 
Alright, they ruined Tina's character and aged everyone two or three decades, so what about the movie? It was meh, a linear heartless story that checked a lot of marketing boxes but didn't deliver anything evocative on screen.
 
The story is that the Atlas CEO hires Lilith to find Tina. Turns out that, in movie logic, Tina is supposed to be required to open the vault because she is the only daughter of Iridian (produced as a clone from Iridian blood). So Lilith goes to Pandora, finds Tina, realizes she's on the wrong team and joins with Roland and Krieg to save Tina from Atlas. In an unfathomable twist of logic, they seek out the vault key (a thing in the game, but three things in the movie). It turns out Tanis is the only one who knows where it should be, so Tanis joins the team. That's the point where they explain that Lilith's mom programmed Claptrap to help Lilith. So, magic, Claptrap is on the team too. It's just these endless convenient contrivances to get the team together. They spent so much time trying to shoehorn together these characters into the same frame, that they forgot to film a proper movie.
 
By the time they have the band together, the movie is just about done. They have one more battle wherein Lilith goes siren for the first time ever. They eventually open the vault and kill the Atlas CEO (Athena did that in the game). But hey, what's in the vault? Now that it's open, isn't it dangerous? Don't know the answer to any of that. The movie just cut to a big post-Deathstar Ewok-style party in Sanctuary. It's silly, on a lot of levels.
 
What's on the screen is just one overlong battle after another, then the lights come up. They develop no interpersonal relationships, get to use any cool alien tech or do anything noteworthy. It's just a bunch of overlong Mad Max style gunfights.
 
It's a mediocre movie, at best. If you care about the game, it's a travesty, barely watchable. My recommendation is that if you feel you need to watch it, stream it for free somewhere in a few years, and make sure you're plenty intoxicated so your brain will slide over all the stupid bits.