A REVIEW OF BORDERLANDS: A MOVIE MADE FROM A GAME 10 YEARS TOO LATE
Bang Bang Loot Bang Bang
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Bang Bang Loot Bang Bang 🔫🥷🏾💰 〰️
All your favorite characters standing around and taking pictures!
Have you ever heard the tale of the Borderlands? Borderlands is one of the first "looter shooter" video games. It came out in 2009 on the PlayStation 3 and supported 4 players. If you could get your hands on two or three buddies (or 3 different Playstations like we did), and spend hours trolling around a murderous wasteland using each character’s superpower all in the name of violence. You'd spend your time using little guns to kill monsters and find bigger guns to kill bigger monsters until your mom, boss, or partner forced you to do something else.
Playing Borderlands with my friends is one of the times I shot Bliss straight up my nose and into my brain. The first Borderlands was really fun. Of course, as the great James Stephanie Sterling says, “Video game companies don't want some money; they want ALL of the money.” In no way was this more true than with the Borderlands franchise.
The success of this first game set 2K to create more games. Action games! Story games! Prequel games! More action games! There are three Borderlands games in the action series and a ton of other games with the same flair or characters surrounding those games. Each action game was bigger than the last until the world turned to worlds and everything was too big to go out and do. My hat’s off to anyone who did everything in any Borderlands game, but the rest of us have too much to do. Borderlands was a great game that became good. Then, it went from a good game that became too hard to play. It's always sad to see a franchise die due to its glory.
What if committing acts of violence was an Olympic sport?
I thought this was a movie review!
It is! Borderlands (2024) (cause they're going to try this again) is a movie that seems to expect that you're aware of the game even if you haven't played it. I'm sure who is responsible for release dates, but the last week of the Olympic action and a week after Deadpool & Wolverine came out was not a good time for this movie to hit theatres. This film made 8 million in its first weekend and had a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. In movie speak that translates to "bombed at the box office." I don't think it was set up to be well received.
Due to watching Olympic Basketball and Breakin, it took a few days before I could see Borderlands (2024). Due to my long history with the game series I already knew what was going to happen in the film. That is part of the fun of a movie like this. I also love going to see movies the internet gets mad about so I just had to go myself and you know what…
I liked it.
It's not the best movie ever made, but it's a good popcorn-munching action fest. All your favorite characters from the games are in it. Roland (Kevin Hart), Lilith (Cate Blanchett), and Tanis (Jamie Lee Curtis) from Borderlands are there. Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) and her exploding bodonkadonks, and Krieg the Psycho (Florian Munteanu) from Borderlands 2 are there. Claptrap (Jack Black) and Moxxi (Gina Gershon) from every Borderlands game are there too. Marcus (Benjamin Byron Davis) is always trying to sell guns to everyone. Borderlands (2024) brings Borderlands games to life.
It's just a shame it was released in 2024 instead of 2014. The last time I played a Borderlands game was 2019. This movie would have been much more successful if it came out 10 years ago.
Why does the Internet hate it?
Lets all go into the acid sewers, gang!
I don't think anyone should trust the Internet. It tells lies like it's a job. I enjoyed the movie, but I've been playing Borderlands off and on for 15 years. I don't finish many games due to making music for the people, but I finished all 3 of the Borderlands action games. So I was excited to see how this film would play out.
The movie breaks down like this:
Narration
Violence
Meet a main character
Violence
Meet another main character
More violence
Meet Claptrap
More delicious violence
Foxxy Moxxi
EVEN MORE VIOLENCE
Dead fake dad
Claptrap dancing like he always does
You get it. This isn't a movie to think about or turn your critical brain on for. You just take it in and have the best time you can. Every movie doesn't have to be a "thinker," but Borderlands (2024) doesn’t try at all. There is so much violence in the movie, but it's violence that doesn't matter. That's the way the Borderlands (2024) movie is just like the games. You just kill and kill and kill until you stop noticing. At least in the games, some characters die and it affects other characters. The movie is not interested in that. This can be fun for a while, but it eventually wears on you. It wears on me at least. It felt to me like watching Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. A fun movie I remember nothing about other than The Rock and Jack Black were in it.
Should I Go See Borderlands (2024)
If you’re into Jamie Lee Curtis the answer is “absolutely.”
Maybe?
If you've played the Borderlands games as much as I have, then this is definitely worth checking out. You won't buy any collector’s items from this, but it's a fun watch.
If you have not played or even heard of Borderlands, you should probably go watch It Ends With Us or Deadpool & Wolverine. Borderlands (2024) is not made for you. I only liked this because I played the games. Pandora is Pandora. Piss Wash Gully is Piss Wash Gully. Psychos are Psychos or Super Badass Psychos. Everything looks like it looks in the game. Beautiful work bringing it to life, but we've seen it before. It's nothing new, and a lot of the comedy falls flat.
So while I don't typically use any scoring system, if I did, I would Borderlands (2024) is a 6 out of 10.
I liked it, but I wouldn't bother if I didn't have 15 years with the games. It all would have been so much better if they pushed out a worse version with unknown actors 5 to 10 years ago.
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