Borderlands has been one of the highly anticipated star-studded movies that has just crumbled as it turned out to be a critical disaster. Directed by Eli Roth who has Thanksgiving, Knock Knock, Cabin Fever, and Hostel franchise to his credit got a huge budget to make a video game adaptation of Borderlands. However, despite the multi-starrer promise, the movie is hated by critics to a level that it remained at 0% score on Rotten Tomatoes as of writing the piece.
Borderlands Debuts On Rotten Tomatoes With 0% Score
A zero percent Rotten Tomatoes debut is devastating for any movie but it revealed that the movie made no significant effort to make it likable for critics. The movie, directed by Eli Roth was a huge ambitious project with astonishing hype built around it, however, all of the expectations were crushed after the review bombs. As of writing this article, the movie is at 4% score from 28 reviews.
Borderlands stars A-lister Cate Blanchett alongside Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Edgar Ramírez, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu, Gina Gershon, and Jamie Lee Curtis but all those big names could not save the movie from the mess it has created.
The movie comes from a screenplay by Eli Roth and Joe Crombie that follows Lilith, portrayed by Blanchett, is a notorious bounty hunter with a shadowy past who reluctantly returns to Pandora, the galaxy’s most chaotic planet. Her mission is to locate the missing daughter of Atlas, played by Ramírez, the universe’s most powerful and ruthless figure.
Along the way, Lilith teams up with an unlikely group of misfits, including Roland, a seasoned mercenary (Hart); Tiny Tina, a wild demolition-obsessed pre-teen (Greenblatt); Krieg, Tina’s hulking protector (Munteanu); Dr. Tannis, an eccentric and battle-hardened scientist (Curtis); and Claptrap, a sarcastic robot (Black). Together, this ragtag team faces off against alien creatures and dangerous bandits as they race to uncover one of Pandora’s most explosive secrets. As they fight for the fate of the universe, they discover something even more important—each other.
Critics Hated Borderlands
The reviews of Borderland are a clear case of a movie heading toward inevitable disaster. The movie is reportedly made with reportedly $100-$120 million production budget and judging by the initial reviews, Borderland would have a hard time recovering the cash invested in the project. Here let’s see what critics are saying about the movie.
“It’s dragged us back to a time when studios used to make these with all the grace and acuity of a drunk person attempting to place a 3 am chicken nugget order,” Rotten Tomatoes top critic Clarisse Loughrey from Independent (UK) said of Borderlands.
Jonathan Sim from ComingSoon.net wrote that Borderlands “fails to deliver the cinematic experience it should. It’s one of Roth’s weakest films, offering little excitement or laughs.” Looper.com’s Cynthia Vinney said that the movie is “dull” at best, “The movie feels like a string of sequences in a video game, but since you’re not playing, it feels tedious instead of inspired, dull instead of gripping.”
“It’s just disappointing that the source material has so much more to offer in terms of its layered characters and complicated themes of trauma and survival that the film seems either uninterested in or incapable of tapping into,” Collider critic Taylor Gates wrote.
Alistair Ryder from AwardsWatch wrote, “Borderlands is the worst kind of bad movie; the type devoid of any offbeat quirks that could propel it to a second life as a cult classic, feeling insufferable and overlong at a brisk 102 minutes because of its sheer lack of originality.”
Borderlands is now showing in cinemas.
Dentist by day, cinephile by night. Part-time entertainment writer with a love for cinema and I intend to bring my passion visible with captivating articles writing on pop culture, or anything that is mildly relating to movies or shows would grab my attention.