When I entered, I had my doubts about Borderlands, the latest over-the-top video game adaptation, made to appeal to PG13-rated audiences.

First off, the game has a nearly decade-long history of failed attempts to crack the code, including by Craig Mazin, who now shares co-authorship as “Joe Crombie,” which only has one listed name on iMDB and, according to iMDB, is a pseudonym for Mazin.)

If so, after a huge success on the small screen Chernobyl AND The last of us, you can understand why he wouldn’t want to be associated with the final product. Then, its original director and credited co-writer and story creator Eli Roth shot the film during the pandemic in 2021. But when two weeks of reshoots were required, he had to hand it over to someone else because of a commitment to finish last year’s holiday horror film, Thanksgiving.

So Tim Miller (2016) (Deadpool) took over and was given the title of executive producer. Lionsgate ends up throwing him into an August cinematic desert reminiscent of actual the wasteland that makes up Pandora, the desolate place on the planet where most of the film’s action takes place.

So thank goodness for Cate Blanchett, who shot this before her acclaimed 2022 drama, Tar. Like almost everything else it touches, it somehow makes the main character of bounty hunter Lillith not only worth watching, but even reliable. In a hectic world Borderlands, It’s a tall order. After the movie’s plot, when we first meet her, she’s in a bar on Prometha and quickly demonstrates her incredible skills, which is noticed by the shrewd CEO Atlas (Edgar Ramirez), who hires her to bring back his missing daughter, Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), from Pandora, which, as it turns out, is Lillith’s old hometown, which still bears the psychological scars from that. Nevertheless, the promise of easy cash makes her take on the mission. The previous residents of Pandora, however, completely devastated the place. It’s a toxic dump and now looks like something out of Furiosa, only worse. Nevertheless, in the blink of an eye, he finds Ariana, who is shooting explosive stuffed bunnies like napalm and is clearly a handful.

In conclusion, the so-called Vault remains on Pandora, which may hold the key to the survival of the planet and the universe, and Ariana may be key she makes this discovery on her own, something her father, the titular villain, knows all too well.

It was left behind by the now extinct Eridians, but myth (?) has it that it has great technological value in good – and bad – hands. In its pure form Guardians of the Galaxy fashion, a motley crew of motley crews slowly emerge one by one, each with their own motives. There’s Roland (Kevin Hart), who has kidnapped Tina, Krieg (Florian Munteanu), Dr. Patricia Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), with her own secrets from the past, and Claptrap, a wannabe Wall-E, a robot with the witty voice of Jack Black, who has all the best lines in the entire movie.

Along the way, Lillith also meets helpful nightclub diva Mad Moxxi (a vibrant Gina Gershon), thrown into the stew. They have to move the IMAX screen aside full colorful villains, many of Atlas’s associates hot on their heels, not to mention Atlas himself, who wants to create a superweapon, because the game is all about finding the Vault.

The film, which Roth largely birthed, looks incredibly good, is very colorful, very expensive, and full of guns and explosions. It rarely slows down to catch its breath or to make sense. I’ve never played the video game, which has been around for over a decade. But I have to believe it’s probably more engaging than the film Roth shows here, despite cast of a game trying to make it work well enough to create a franchise. I wouldn’t count on that happening.

Title: Borderlands

Distributor: Lion Gate

Release date: August 9, 2024

Director: Eli Roth

Scenario: Eli Roth and Joe Crombie

To throw: Cate Blanchett, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Hart, Gina Gershon, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu, Jack Black, Haley Bennett, Edgar Ramirez

Rate: PG13

Duration: 1 hour and 42 minutes