This is one vault that should have stayed closed!

The weird and wacky world of Borderlands has always been beloved by gamers. When someone wants to dive into a game filled with explosive action, rampant destruction, and over-the-top battles that leave them grinning from ear to ear, they play Borderlands.

Unfortunately, this movie adaptation doesn’t live up to the hype. It shows no interest in telling an original or even faithful narrative to the source material. The characters are lifeless, and the humour that has won over so many gamers is completely absent. Instead of delivering the chaotic action-adventure fans expect, I found myself wondering what crazy lunatic greenlit this dumpster fire of a project.

Set far off in the distant future where humanity has colonized the stars, Borderlands takes place on Pandora, a planet where a vault containing secret wealth has remained locked for eons. Vault hunters seek to open it, but according to prophecy, it will be the child of Pandora who ultimately unlocks the ancient technology stored by the mysterious Eridians.

The movie follows a group of four: Lilith, Roland, Tiny Tina, Krieg, and Claptrap—played respectively by Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu, and Jack Black. Despite its star-studded cast, directed by Eli Roth, the film barely captures even a fraction of the brilliance of the award-winning game series.

To be fair, not a single member of the cast feels well-suited for their role, though Cate Blanchett delivers a commendable performance as Lilith. The rest feel like they were cast for their fame rather than their fit for the characters. Jack Black manages to deliver the occasional zinger, which is expected given his years of comedic experience, but even his talents can’t carry this film.

The opposite is true for Kevin Hart, whose performance as Roland is utterly forgettable. If there’s one person who shouldn’t have been cast as an action hero, it’s him. But perhaps the most glaring miscast is Ariana Greenblatt as Tiny Tina, who simply doesn’t fit the role in any way, shape, or form.

And then there’s the villain, played by the remarkably forgettable Edgar Ramirez. He’s your typical bad guy with an evil plan to gain ultimate power, a trope so tired that you don’t even need to remember it to watch the film… if you can even bear to watch it at all. To be honest, I only saw it because I was bored on a Saturday afternoon, having missed the chance to join a counter-protest in the UK.

There are a lot of problems with this film: the casting, the plot, the dialogue (oh god, the dialogue!). The only saving grace is that it visually resembles a Borderlands adaptation. I say “resembles” because, clearly, it’s not. Let me be clear: I’ve never played a Borderlands game from start to finish, and even I know that the wild, guns-blazing, heart-racing adventure fans expect is nowhere to be found here.

This feels like yet another attempt by a studio to take a beloved game, strip it of its core elements, and make it “marketable” to mass audiences. The end result is a butchering so severe it might as well belong in an HBO adult-rated show.

I truly feel for the fans who will go into this movie with some glimmer of hope, only to leave wondering why they just spent £10 on tickets and snacks for what may very well go down as one of the worst video game adaptations ever made.

2 out of 10.