Starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Edgar Ramirez, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu, Gina Gershon and Jamie Lee Curtis

Directed by Eli Roth

Lionsgate, out now

Pandora is home to an alien vault of untold power. The one problem is, no one can find it. Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) is the daughter of Atlas (Edgar Ramirez) and may be the core of the prophecy that will unlock the vault. Rescued from captivity by Roland (Kevin Hart), a mercenary and Krieg (Florian Munteanu) a masked lunatic, she disappears. Lilith (Cate Blanchett) is a bounty hunter sent to find them and aided, if aided is the word, by Claptrap (Jack Black), a joyously unpleasant robot who has been sent to help her. All they have to do is team up, not kill each other and open the vault. How hard can it be?

Borderlands feels very strange. The Tim Miller-directed reshoots appear to have changed the film drastically. So much so that there’s a montage of what seems to be an extensive action sequence five minutes in and a nagging sense that whole scenes have been taken out and replaced. This feels, oddly like the original releases of Rebel Moon. A superstructure of a story suspending a great cast who clearly showed up for work at its core but, for some reason, we’re not seeing that work.

That means that a lot of the cast barely register. Edgar Ramirez has maybe twenty lines as the villain of the piece and Greenblatt not much more. Gershon’s turn as Mad Moxxi is a cameo and Hart, who plays this very very straight, is one of several central cast members who have nothing to do but hit their marks and cash their cheques. Lee Curtis in particular is essentially decorative until she’s suddenly vital in the third act. Scenes with Penn Jillette, Cheyenne Jackson and Charles Babalola as characters from the games were filmed but no hint of them is here and there’s a nagging sense of something just off screen for much of the movie’s run-time.

That’s a massive shame because the grounded aesthetic Eli Roth and presumably Miller brought works brilliantly and the Day-Glo happy go gunfire nature of the games is often there on the screen. There’s a fight on a wall of stacked mining vehicles that’s genuinely great and Ramirez gets a brilliant, inventive opening scene that sets him up as a threat right before he disappears for about an hour. The ideas are there, the cast is there, the script might well have been there but the movie’s never there for long.

It’s not all bad news. Blanchett, despite being asked to pose like every 90s female comic character with no pelvis for the entire movie, is great as the laconic, hard-travelled Lilith, as is the previously mentioned Munteanu and what little we get of Greenblatt. The breakout out here though is Black, whose chirpily terrible droid has all the movie’s big laughs and carries a good chunk of it on his tiny spot welded shoulders.

Verdict: People are going to tell you that this is one of the worst films ever made. They need to see more films. This is by no stretch of the imagination especially good, and it certainly doesn’t seem to be the movie Roth set out to make. But at its worst Borderlands is fun, and if you’ve ever seen and enjoyed a straight to DVD 90 minute B-movie you’ll find a lot to enjoy here. I just wish we got the movie they set out to make. 5/10

Alasdair Stuart