Now showing; Cert 12A Cate Blanchett as Lilith and Ariana Greenblatt as Tiny Tina in 'Borderlands'. Photo: Lionsgate Cate Blanchett as Lilith and Ariana Greenblatt as Tiny Tina in Borderlands. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Lionsgate Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu and Cate Blanchett in 'Borderlands'.
Photo: Lionsgate To greater or lesser degrees, the pandemic lockdown made us all behave in rather unusual ways. We shopped online impulsively from the comfort of our couches. Neighbourhood curtains were twitched at anyone daring to step outside restrictions.
Cate Blanchett said yes to a video game adaptation directed by Eli Roth. She said as much herself. “Covid madness” was Blanchett’s explanation when recently asked just what was going through the mind of the twice Oscar-winner when she accepted Roth’s invitation to star in Borderlands.
“It’s not Citizen Kane ,” she went on to add by way of breezy dissociation. While the space-western shoot-em-up mightn’t seem her natural habitat, the Antipodean screen giant has in fairness made a few left-hand turns in her career, often successfully ( Thor: Ragnarok , I’m Not There ). And maybe Roth managed to sell her the part as something of a challenge, uncharted ground for her lofty abilities to have a crack at and keep the mortgage paid while she prepared for her upcoming (and subsequently eighth Oscar-nominated) role as Lydia Tár.
But video game adaptations are among the lowliest swamps in Hollywood. Forcing one action medium into another and cramming the screenplay with dorky insider context and humour, rarely ever do they emerge as anything but ghastly looking, cynically conceived corporate cash-ins. Cate Blanchett as Lilith and Ariana Greenblatt as Tiny Tina in 'Borderlands'.
Photo: Lionsgate It stands to reason, then, that Blanchett is by far the best thing about Borderlands , but the bar is set low for this outing. While talk of last-minute reshoots (with Deadpool director Tim Miller standing in) didn’t bode well for what was in store, it hasn’t managed to prepare ordinary cinemagoers for the finished result – which, perhaps tellingly, has already been disowned by fans of the source video game. Blanchett is all gravity-defying hair and gun-slinging swagger as Lilith, the bounty hunter who reluctantly takes on a high-paying rescue job for Atlas, a powerful galactic arms mogul (Edgar Ramirez).
His daughter Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) has been kidnapped and taken to a dust-blown scrapheap planet called Pandora and he wants her found and returned. Lilith is loath to return to Pandora because of some unspoken origins trauma. The planet has long been rumoured to be the site of a lost treasure that will grant the possessor gargantuan powers, causing a fruitless gold rush on the terrain that has since fizzled out.
When Lilith eventually runs into Tina, she quickly discovers the girl is not in fact a helpless captive but instead one of a formidable band of mercenaries looking to find the weapon before it falls into the wrong hands. Unashamedly cribbed from Guardians of the Galaxy , the team comprises vaguely antiheroic all-sorts – Greenblatt’s cute but deadly munitions expert, a masked berserker (Florian Munteanu), Kevin Hart’s ex-soldier, and a deeply annoying robot voiced by Jack Black. Roth’s film is an example of “downcycling” As the true nature of Lilith’s client and his intentions comes into view, an alliance forms to try and save the galaxy.
If “upcycling” is the process of taking odds and ends and turning them into something better, then Roth’s film is an example of “downcycling”, of ramming Mad Max: Fury Road into Guardians of the Galaxy , two fine films, and making something worse from the materials. There are admittedly one or two energised battle scenes, some even featuring the real Blanchett and not a CGI rendering of her. Jamie Lee Curtis and Gina Gershon turn up in the bafflingly wasteful cast, all for a film that never visually appears to belong anywhere above the domain of straight-to-streaming.
At the centre of all the incessant bleating, the humour vacuums, the drearily predictable plot cliches, there is Blanchett, smirking and pummelling without a strand of her fiery cowlick going awry. Her sheer presence, Borderlands ’s sole gravitational centrepoint, is all we have to hold on to. While she is indeed one of few actors around who could actually lend backbone to something as limp and uninspired as this, there are ultimately too many holes to plug here.
You might as well cut out the picture of her Lilith and stick it on your wall. Everything else can be discarded. Two stars Join the Irish Independent WhatsApp channel Stay up to date with all the latest news.
