There are gamers who care about the plot and there are gamers who, too busy reloading with ultra-magma cartridges, would be surprised to hear there was a plot. Your current critic, who must have spent 80 or 90 hours playing Borderlands, could, then as now, barely relate a sentence of relevant lore from the first-person shooter. Who cares?
Early on it seems as if Eli Roth’s unpretentious, surprisingly starry adaptation is on much the same page. Cate Blanchett’s intergalactic bounty hunter (yes, that Cate Blanchett) talks us through the prehistory of this universe – blah-blah Eridian vaults, blah-blah something else – before concluding that the yarn “sounds like some wacko BS”. Hang on. We’re not back in the smug, self-regarding snark of Deadpool & Wolverine, are we?
Not that much. A fair bit of Borderlands, as you might expect from the director of Hostel and Cabin Fever, is straight-up, uncomplicated pulp. Some bastard in a suit hires the ruthless Lilith – I think Blanchett is having fun, but who can tell? – to retrieve his missing daughter from that bounty hunter’s home planet of Pandora. She has barely arrived before she hooks up with Claptrap the annoying droid and a bunch of differently irreverent ne’er-do-wells. (The least said about Gina Gershon’s Mae West impersonation the soonest mended.)
It gives some sense of the distinction between the approach here and in Deadpool to note that, rather than archly staging a massed assault to Madonna’s Like a Prayer, they choose the proudly irony-free strains of Ace of Spades by Motörhead. Old school. “That’s the way I like it, baby; I don’t want to live forever.”
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For the most part, the familiar bits appear to be cliches, not “tropes”. When Blanchett actually says “I’m getting too old for this shit” it doesn’t play like a gag at the expense of all the superannuated action stars who have said it before her. Unfortunately, the longer the thing goes on the less it ceases to be good honest rubbish and the more it expects us to care about the stupid, stupid plot. Console junkies will find themselves involuntarily hammering an imagined X button in the hope of getting back to the gameplay. No good. You’re stuck with this wacko BS.
