‘Borderlands’ debuts with a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes: Here’s what critics are saying about the star-studded critical flop of the year

A big budget science fiction adventure film based on a popular video game featuring an ensemble cast that includes Oscar-winners Cate Blanchett and Jamie Lee Curtis plus beloved comedians Jack Black and Kevin Hart? What could possibly go wrong?

Apparently, everything, if we can believe the trusty Tomatometer, which as of writing has “Borderlands” debuting with an astonishing rating of 0%.

(As of Friday, that score has improved to 5%.)

“Is it too soon to call Borderlands the worst movie of ’24?” the Star’s film critic Peter Howell posted on X. “There are still many cinema turkeys headed our way. But this gobbler mixes inept directing, terrible writing, indifferent acting and gawdawful CGI into such stupefying boredom, it feels nothing could top it for badness.”

To be fair, the expectations for the film, which follows an infamous outlaw (Cate Blanchett), who teams up with a group of misfits to find the missing daughter of the most powerful man in the universe, were not exactly sky-high.

Based on the popular video game franchise — a first-person “looter-shooter” first released back in 2009 — the film adaptation was first announced way back in 2015. In 2020, director Eli Roth, best known for gory horror films like “Hostel” and “Cabin Fever,” was tapped to direct the film, based on a screenplay by Craig Mazin, a writer best known for the acclaimed TV series “Chernobyl” and “The Last of Us.”

In 2023, it was announced that the film was going through two weeks of reshoots under a new director. A few months later, reports emerged that the film was stuck in “post-production hell,” prompting Mazin to remove his name from the project. Rumours began to swirl that Mazin was still attached to the film under a pseudonym — a rumour he denied.

“I am not a credited writer on the film, so I cannot claim any kind of authorship of ‘Borderlands,’ much less ‘co-writing,’” he told Variety. “I did see the report about the pseudonym, which is false. I did not use a pseudonym. If the name in question is indeed a pseudonym, all I can say is … it’s not mine.”

Not great!

Here’s a quick look at some of the early critics reviews for the film, which hits theatres Friday.

In the Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney writes that the film is a “joylessly gonzo adaptationof the popular video game,” and describes it as “a cut-rate Guardians of the Galaxy grafted onto Mad Max territory with a smidgen of Star Wars.”

Writing for Gamespot, Phil Owen described “Borderlands” as an “unpleasant experience,” one that harkens back to an era when video game adaptations were almost uniformly “generic and disposable.”

For IGN, Matt Donato described “Borderlands” as “an abysmal waste of a beloved franchise that takes a kooky band of murderous misfits and drains the life out of their first adventure together.”

“Visually, Borderlands is one of the ugliest studio releases you’ll see this year. Even in IMAX, Pandora’s dusty digital backdrops resemble pixelated vomit … The games’ cel-shaded, pleasingly pop-arty aesthetic is one of their most attractive features, so why would you drown the movie’s opening sequence in dimly lit murk?”

Jim Slotek gave the film a D-rating for the movie site Original Cin:

“An hour and 40 minutes of noise without any tension or sense of purpose, Borderlands would be Exhibit Z in the conventional wisdom that video games don’t transfer well filmically — that is, if recent efforts like The Last of Us or Fallout hadn’t proved otherwise.”

In a one-star review for The Independent, Clarisse Loughrey called the film a “total disaster.”

“ … while it might not singlehandedly undo the goodwill built up around recent video game adaptations — specifically television’s The Last of Us and Fallout — it’s 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 3 a.m. chicken nugget order.”