The first impressions of the Borderlands movie are about as negative as you’d expect

A first crop of people have now watched the Borderlands movie, and following the lifting of a social media embargo have shared their opinions, which are mostly that it is pretty bad. Critics and early viewers from a fan event are being very blunt and very frank: They did not like it much. We’re seeing words like “lifeless” and “obnoxious” and “baffling.” Praise is pretty thin on the ground among these first responses, and faint when it does appear—with an exceptional few giving short, relatively positive summaries.

I hope that nobody is surprised by this reaction: That would mean they missed the copious quantities of people dunking on this movie after the first, then second, then final trailers debuted. A wacky big-budget adaptation of a videogame franchise being roundly panned is almost a fait accompli—especially one that has little to immediately recommend it aside from star power and budget.

“I really wanted to like it,” said reporter Matthew Simpson (via GamesRadar), who went on to say that it had an “uninspired plot” and “several phoned in performances.”

The Borderlands movie is an action comedy directed by Eli Roth, and stars people like Jack Black, Kevin hart, Ariana Greenblatt, Jamie Lee Curtis, Florian Munteanu, and Cate Blanchett as characters from the first game—Claptrap, Roland, Lilith, and the rest—going on an adventure to, of course, rob an ancient and secret vault of its copious treasures.

Cate Blanchett, notably, said she’s probably only in this movie because of a “touch of covid madness” after being cooped up at home with nothing but gardening for too long.

Bitesize Break’s Adriano Caporusso said that it “swaps the mayhem and imagination of the games for a lifeless, unfunny, and visually repulsive dud.” 

More positive opinions came from people who were clearly genre or game fans predisposed to like Borderlands for its pedigree rather than as a standalone movie. They generally noted things like an “exceptional level of detail for those who have played the video games” or called the movie a “hell of a film” as “an addition to the Borderlands universe.”

That probably bodes well for people who’re excited about it as Borderlands fans, but not for its success with a more general audience. We’ll see how it goes when the movie premiers in just a few days, on August 9. Until then, you can go crawling through #BorderlandsMovie on Twitter if you’d like to find more reactions in the wild. 

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