The Borderlands film was not good. I don’t know anyone who likes it, and I’ve never read anyone say something nice about it on the internet. Even its creator, Eli Roth, doesn’t seem to like it very much, and in a new interview with the director we can gain some insight into why it ended up as bad as it did.
Speaking to Variety about his new film Ice Cream Man which, as far as I can tell, is not a videogame adaptation, Roth said the exorbitant $120 million budget had the non-creatives worried. “As things grow bigger, studios just naturally become more risk averse,” he said. “My nature as a filmmaker is to do the thing that’s left of center, because that’s what has worked for me.”
With a budget like that the film needed to cast the widest net possible. Lionsgate executives demanded tweaks to accommodate a family-friendly PG-13 rating, which seems like an odd creative choice given that a) it’s a Borderlands adaptation and b) it’s made by the guy who made Hostel and Cabin Fever. To be authentic, it basically needed to be an ultraviolent gorefest, which it wasn’t.
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“You got something that belonged to nobody,” Roth went on. “It’s not a kids’ movie, but it’s trying to appeal to everybody. It’s for gamers, but it doesn’t have the violence the gamers want because it can’t be that extreme because it costs too much. You just wind up with a movie that’s neither fish nor fowl.”
PC Gamer’s Joshua Wolens seemed to agree in his review (which was not classified a “review” when it was published, possibly out of mercy). “It’s not just bad, it’s bland tasteless mush that no one involved seemed interested in saving,” he wrote.
Other critics ranging the games press through to actual film mastheads didn’t like it either: even IGN—who loved the otherwise near-universally condemned Super Mario Galaxy Movie—called it “awful”.
It’s a shame because the Borderlands games can apparently spin a gripping yarn. Some of my colleagues really rate the storytelling in Borderlands 2, and Telltale’s Tales From The Borderlands was received very well. But given the response to Roth’s outing, it feels unlikely anyone will take another stab at it again.