Borderlands review - the end of a universe?

So, it falls to me to review perhaps the least-anticipated film of the year. Borderlands is based on an admired video game, and there may be nothing more hostile than pissed-off video-gamers.

The tsunami of online negativity aimed for weeks at merely the film’s trailer was nothing compared to the onslaught that followed the lifting of review embargoes these past few days. The picture was slammed and dunked. If they think it’s all over for the era of Peak Superhero Movie, it is now. Come back Madame Web, all is forgiven.

But there is, at least, a question of interest for readers of this site and students of the summits of acting. What the bejeezus is Cate Blanchett doing in this pile-up of multiple forms of transportation? The 55-year-old GOAT doesn’t merely donate a scene or two to the shambles, perhaps as a favour to director Eli Roth with whom she worked on the family feature The House With a Clock in Its Walls (2018), but plays the ass-kicking lead in just about every fight-heavy scene.

She says she was suffering from cabin fever during Covid lockdowns and so needed something to get her back to acting, which this gig in Hungary provided; from there, she flew off to film her majestic turn in last year’s Tár. (She’s also given a publicity interview noting pointedly how little she was paid for The Lord of the Rings.) Blanchett’s performance here is like an athlete warming up for a major competition: it’s flat and level, with little risk of career injury, and thus there’s no danger of the wincing, winking antics you sometimes get with top-level thesps in this kind of payday project. Her low-voiced intelligence would carry you through a 100-minute recitation of the phone book, which this utterly by-the-numbers script resembles.

Blanchett (“I’m getting too old for this shit”) plays a jaundiced bounty hunter in a trash-ridden outer space who hooks up with a ragtag team of ne’er-do-wells (“Maybe we got off on the wrong foot”) to track down magic rocks that could unlock age-old secrets and let a bad guy control the universe (“Take me to the vault – now!”). Numerous references to Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Guardians of the Galaxy are not really references: they’re outright steals.

The film was originally shot as an R-rated (adult certificate) effort, before a second director (Tim Miller) took over from horror maestro Roth to re-hack it into a 12A. But the need for wit and emotional trauma in any superhero movie passed both directors by: presumably they thought irony was something to do with taking creases out of your clothes. For all the running around she’s made to do, Blanchett’s character is flattered no end – indeed, she’s more or less deified at the close – as her gelled sideways bob of crimson hair stays jauntily in place. She’s allowed to sail through without touching the sides of this disaster.

Among the other cast, comic Kevin Hart is an oddly sombre platoon-leader type, while Jack Black voices an excruciatingly unfunny bin-sized robot – an R2-D2 shaped like SpongeBob SquarePants and falsely said to be “programmed for humour”. Only Jamie Lee Curtis as a sagacious clue-keeper offers the glimmer of a nimble performance amid the exasperated yelling and Motörhead on the soundtrack. A brief quiet scene between her and Blanchett inches us perilously close to layered drama before we’re off again into numbingly dull, time-to-check-your-phone mayhem.

• More film reviews on theartsdesk