Borderlands movie review: Cate Blanchett actioner is a trap not worth the claps

Borderlands movie review: Cate Blanchett has proven her versatility over the years, but she hasn’t had her Hunger Games or Mad Max yet. She takes a shot at the fantasy action genre with her new movie, which unfortunately, feels like a sleepwalk more than a cakewalk. She always had the body language of an action star despite her filmography being populated by gritty dramas. It’s great to see her wield guns, jump around, and flaunt that smirk, but she deserves a far better vessel to prove her worth on that front.
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Cate plays Lilith, a bounty hunter who’s tasked to return to her estranged homeland of Pandora by a wealthy businessman to bring back his kidnapped daughter. However, once she meets the daughter, she realises it’s the father who’s the problem. Along the way, she joins forces with unlikely allies, including another gun-wielding warrior Roland (Kevin Hart), a masked buffy dude Krom (Olivier Richters), a resourceful scientist Patricia (Jamie Lee Curtis), and a tiny robot aptly called Claptrap (voiced by Jack Black).
The concept of strange bedfellows travelling across a futuristic world makes Borderlands eerily familiar to Guardians of the Galaxy. But the familiarity vanishes as soon as it strikes. The action sequences, though quite frequent and serviceable, are so uninspired that there’s an absolute dearth of originality. There are car chases, tiptoeing in a tunnel with acid flowing beneath, and navigating a cave full of bad guys. But these feel more like checking out all stages from a video game (duh, Borderlands is a video game adaptation) than a journey embarked upon in flesh and blood.
The unimaginative worldbuilding doesn’t help either. Every threat they encounter, every weapon they invoke, every territory they cross, feels visually derivative and conceptually stale. There isn’t a singular piece of imagination that has stayed with me, except Claptrap shitting out bullets from his butthole. Jack Black tries his best to liven up the screenplay with his zingers and ebullient dialogue delivery. He even strikes a Kung Fu (Panda) pose in an action sequence. But the claptraps are just not enticing enough for us to fall prey and applaud, pun intended. His Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle co-star Kevin Hart barely contributes to the fun, even though his jamming with Jack while they’re on an adventure made for such a fun time in that movie.
Jack and Cate still managed to create a make-believe world in Eli Roth’s 2018 fantasy comedy The House With A Clock In Its Walls. But here, they struggle from the get go. Even Keerthy Suresh’s Buji makes for a more worthy techno companion to Prabhas’ Bhairava in Nag Ashwin’s recent dystopian sci-fi epic Kalki 2898 AD. Towards the end of the film, Cate’s character slides in a dialogue to the villain before striking the final move: “I have something that you don’t enough.” Had Eli and his co-writer Joe Crombie played on that theme from the start and maintained it consistently, Borderlands could’ve made for a more layered movie. But alas, like the rest of the film, that dialogue also remains just a ‘claptrap.’
It could’ve also been an emotional coming-of-age homecoming tale, like a Ladybird or a Causeway, under the guise of an action fantasy. But that track feels more imposed than organically woven in. The incision is evident in the strain with which two Oscar winners – Cate and Jamie Lee Curtis – try to lend some emotional heft to the proceedings. But at the end of the day, Borderlands remains merely a hollow action spectacle, best enjoyed in 4DX, if at all. While we, along with Cate, wait for her definitive action movie, let’s make do with that brief but delectable turn as Hela in Thor: Ragnarok. At least, that’s a trap worth the claps.