What The Most Negative Critic Reviews Said About The Borderlands Movie

When "Borderlands" opened in theaters on August 9, 2024, it brought in just $8.6 million — an astonishingly low figure for a film that cost more than $100 million to make. Then, things just went from bad to worse for "Borderlands" at the box office, with the movie seeing an almost unprecedented 73% drop in its second weekend. Thus far, the video game adaptation has made just $21 million on a reported $115 million budget — and that's before the marketing cost is accounted for. A very rough estimate typically puts marketing at around half a film's production budget, so we're looking at a movie that likely cost in the region of $170 million, making less than a quarter of that at the box office ahead of its fast-approaching streaming debut.

With this in mind, you might be starting to see how much of a historic blunder we're witnessing with "Borderlands." But that's just the box office. Plenty of movies have been commercial failures without actually being bad films. Surely, the receipts for "Borderlands" aren't entirely indicative of its overall quality? Well, put simply, they are. The film has been savaged by critics, who submitted some truly inspired takedowns before tossing the movie's carcass aside to wither in the harsh environs of 2024's movie landscape. At a time when "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" and "The Last of Us" seemed to signal that video game adaptations could finally represent the future of Hollywood, this is a remarkable achievement on the part of Lionsgate and director Eli Roth.

So, why not join us on a quick tour through the wasteland that is the critical reaction to "Borderlands" and see if we can't scavenge some of the more amusing takes?

Unlike our roundup of the worst critical reactions to J. D. Vance's "Hillbilly Elegy," there's no ghoulish figure at the center of this mishap (unless you count Kevin Hart, who played Roland in "Borderlands"). That makes this particular roundup slightly more tragic. But there's simply no way around the fact that the first reactions to "Borderlands" were, well, bad.

This was, unfortunately, a sign of things to come for the movie, but the production had been so beleaguered already that really the first sign of trouble was the fact that this thing took almost 10 years to make. "Borderlands" was first announced in 2015, wrapped filming back in 2021, then sat on the shelf for a couple years before Tim Miller came in to oversee reshoots. But when the movie eventually debuted to an abject D+ CinemaScore, it seemed this long gestation period hadn't helped refine anything about Eli Roth's video game adaptation, as the reviews very much show.

/Film's Bill Bria delivered the kind of take that would, I imagine, make Kevin Hart do that face from the meme. Bria wrote in his 4/10 "Borderlands" review that the movie comes with a "heavily generic storyline and offensively inoffensive tone," reserving much of his scorn for the humor, or lack thereof, in the movie. Bria wrote, "The jokes aren't bad jokes per se; they're non-jokes. It's like watching 'Cardboard: The Movie.'" You might be thinking that you can't get much worse than calling this film "Cardboard: The Movie," but you'd be wrong.

At the time of writing, "Borderland" sits at 10% on Rotten Tomatoes. Now, the site that would have you believe there are only two perfect sci-fi movies in the history of cinema probably shouldn't be taken all that seriously. But in this case, the average rating is at least partly instructive. Unlike the overall percentage, the average rating is RT's aggregation of critics' actual scores for films. So, if a review contains a letter grade, a star rating, or a number out of 10, RT will count that and add it to the average score — and the score for "Borderlands" is a truly dismal 2.8 out of 10.

What, then, has irked the critics so? Well, there are many reasons why "Borderlands" bombed, but one of them is surely, as Brian Tallerico writes in his review for RogerEbert.com that "nothing that works about the games has been adapted intact in this ugly, boring, truly inept piece of filmmaking." This seems to be a shared opinion among reviewers, with the Los Angeles Times' Carlos Aguilar also noting how nothing from the game seems to work in the big screen adaptation. Aguilar writes that "[Eli] Roth and credited co-screenwriter Joe Crombie fail to effectively synthesize the game's lore and the characters' individual histories in a way that can entice the uninitiated."

But it's not just that "Borderlands" failed to emulate whatever it was that made the video games work. Critics really did not hold back when it came to their opinions on the overall quality of the movie. Even Aguilar eventually cast any kind of nuance aside and dubbed "Borderlands" as "an insipid mishmash of trite genre tropes" and "a game-to-screen misfire so thoroughly bad, it's breathtaking." But that's just the start of it...

How bad did the "Borderlands" reviews get? Take a peek at David Fear's Rolling Stone piece in which he concludes that "Borderlands" is "not a movie for critics, as the saying goes. Nor is it suitable for consumption by most gamers, film lovers, or 99 percent of carbon-based life forms." Fear's acerbic assessment is matched only by Peter Howell, who in his review for the Toronto Star writes, "There are still many cinema turkeys headed our way before the year closes. But this sci-fi gobbler mixes inept directing, terrible writing, indifferent acting and gawdawful CGI into such stupefying boredom, it feels like nothing could top it for badness."

Look, critics sometimes get carried away trying to outdo each other by coming up with the most ornate pejorative flourish imaginable, but in the case of "Borderlands," the sheer volume of these damning indictments seems to indicate that the movie really did demand such a response — and those indictments just keep coming.

Variety's Peter Debruge writes, "By the time 'Borderlands' unlocks its vault, not even the characters seem to care what's inside." Allegra Frank at TIME laments, "Right as Hollywood has started to learn how to successfully adapt games for the screen, 'Borderlands' arrives as a reminder of how not to do it." The Independent's Clarisse Loughrey even comes close to Fear and Howell's vitriolic takedowns with her contention that "Borderlands" has "dragged us back to a time when studios used to make these with all the grace and acuity of a drunk person attempting to place a 3am chicken nugget order."

So yeah, that's how bad the reviews can get.

Not quite as overtly antagonistic as David Fear or Peter Howell's appraisals, but perhaps even more quietly devastating, was /Film alum William Bibbiani's review for TheWrap, in which he concluded that "the biggest problem with Eli Roth's 'Borderlands' isn't that it's bad, it's that it's not interesting enough to be bad. It's mass-produced pabulum." Isn't that really the nub of this whole thing? The reason why collecting these innumerable takedowns of "Borderlands" doesn't feel as mean as it sounds is because this film is, for anyone who cares at all about film as an artform, offensive in its cynical attempts to appeal to the masses.

What's more, this wouldn't be the first time Hollywood has served up this kind of "pabulum." In the streaming age, audiences are used to bland, insipid "content" that seems like the result of some marketing exec poring over the latest social media metrics and slapping together something with the help of writers all too willing to churn out scripts akin to the digital sputum coughed up from the depths of Large Language Models' collective digital lungs. Indeed, as Nick Schager writes in his Daily Beast review, the film is "so drearily routine and slapdash that even an A.I. would deem it too plagiaristic." Even worse than this, as many a middling streaming movie has shown, we'll quite often consume this stuff en masse. If anything, then, "Borderlands" is reassuring as it proves that we're still capable of pushing back against this sort of "pabulum" and demanding better.

"Borderlands" is (for now) playing in theaters.