Why You Didn’t Like … Borderlands

(And why we [almost] miss Uwe Boll)

Any time you watch something and catch yourself thinking, “Man, I wished they’d given this one to Uwe Boll,” you’ve crossed into territory so rough, even Mad Max would turn back.

The ‘90s and early 2000s were a dark time for video gamers. It wasn’t just the dial-up internet—it was the dread, the existential fear, of seeing your favourite video game get turned into a movie… by Uwe Boll. The man could take a beloved, iconic game and somehow turn it into two hours of cringe-worthy dialogue and fight scenes that looked like they were choreographed by a mime on roller skates. It’s the kind of filmmaking that makes you question whether anyone in the editing room was even awake, let alone sober.

I never thought I’d say this. Never. But after seeing Borderlands, I kinda miss the guy. At least Boll’s movies had a certain chaotic charm. With Borderlands, it feels like they were aiming for chaotic charm, and missed out on the charm part. Jesus H Christ, shoot me now, but I really wish we’d got to see the Boll cut.

There’s a scene in the original Karate Kid, where Mr. Miyagi is giving Daniel some prime life advice. He says, “Daniel-san, must talk. Walk on road. Walk right side, safe. Walk left side, safe. Walk middle, sooner or later, get squish, just like grape. Here karate, same thing. Either you karate do, yes, or karate do, no. You karate do, guess so, squish just like grape.” It’s as if the movie was trying to walk both the ‘right’ and ‘left’ sides of the road but instead got squished (just like grape)… only this grape is covered in piss jokes and missed potential. It could have been a great movie. It could have been a successful budget B-grade. But it ended up being the worst of both, leaving me with a strange Boll-shaped tear of nostalgia.

Hubris and the Unattainable Ideal

Those not into video games might not know about Randy Pitchford. Pitchford runs a little studio called Gearbox, recently acquired by Take-Two for the eye-watering sum of $460M. Part of Gearbox’s moxie is the Borderlands video game franchise, which has seen us visit Pandora, and Tina Tina’s Wonderlands, many times over. Borderlands presents pure fun and humour channeled through the funnel of chaos, and has sold something like 80 million copies worldwide. There are a lot of Vault Hunters out there.

Pitchford is outspoken. Controversial. A larger than life CEO in at an echelon too often closed off to any but the suits who want 30% YoY growth. Sometimes you need a man like Pitchford. He’s got charisma and knows how to sell a vision. But sometimes you’d prefer a case of late stage syphilis, or a root canal performed by Claptrap. And while you can’t argue at the success of his game franchise, what you can argue is the success of the Borderlands movie, which had a budget of around $115M, with an additional marketing budget of $30M. It’s currently holding receipts for about $31M returned at the end of its blessedly short theatrical run. A titanic loss, by any measure.

I think the first problem we might need to acknowledge with the movie is the Icarus Effect. It’s easy to see Pitchford and some Hollywood suits vibing over the dollars they’d make. How a movie based on the Borderlands franchise would soar on the same wings as the games. But translating an interactive, player-driven experience into a fixed, non-interactive medium is … tricky, especially if you think it was the piss jokes that got the job done. We may never know for sure, but sifting through the tea leaves left by director Roth suggests Pitchford was heavily involved at all points of the creative process. Perhaps he believed his knowledge of gaming would translate to the screen. Perhaps he was either convinced his magic touch could transcend mediums, or he was high on his own supply of Pandora-grade psycho-stimulants. But I can tell you, the piss jokes only take you so far, and generally, that’s right down the shitter. Or, pisser.

While I don’t know if this is true, it’s easy to imagine from a man who’s compared himself to the Beetles.

Boll’s ego was legendary too. He believed his movies were misunderstood masterpieces. It’s easy to guess that Pitchford’s attachment to his brilliant game-world might have stopped him seeing the real issues. Where Boll leaned into the madness, it feels like Borderlands wanted to be both mainstream and niche at the same time.

The Allure of Chaos in Controlled Spaces

There’s a popular concept that you shouldn’t judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree. The real problem is when you require your fish to climb, and to stretch the analogy to a painful extreme, ask it to do the climbing without any ropes. See, in the Borderlands games, players control the chaos. If I want to go into a bandit hideout and toss in a bandolier of grenades, I’m at the helm. While there are scripted dialogue moments in the games, most of the charm and allure is because the players have full agency in the chaotic overload of the experience. 

Borderlands games are known for their offbeat humour, over-the-top action, and self-awareness. The humour works because it’s baked right into gameplay. Claptrap’s antics happen while you’re in control, adding to the chaos of combat or exploration. The world itself feels like a parody of dystopian sci-fi, with colourful villains and absurd quests. Without the game’s interactive nature, the film’s humour relies on friction-fit humour and awkward timing.

It’s difficult to argue that Borderlands game characters are well-written masterworks. For example, Claptrap is often such a fuck-off he makes your teeth hurt, and other characters like Tiny Tina and Patricia Tannis have made players want to self-harm just to stop the hurting in their heads. But that’s all part of the chaos. The mix of piss jokes, violence as humour, innuendo, pop culture references, and absurd characters and dialogue give the games their Boll-like charm. They’re unhinged, in spectacular fashion, but they’re assuming you’re driving the bus. In the film, there’s no player agency. There’s no control. It’s just a barrage of randomness, of absurdity and ridiculousness that feels undirected and relentless. Where the game allows players to engage with the madness on their own terms, the film is a barrage that becomes exhausting. Adding to the exhaustion is confusion. In the games, while characters are caricature, there’s an illusion of depth not just through dialogue but also side quests. Even if they start as stereotypes, players can engage with them and their stories in a way that builds attachment. The film doesn’t give the characters room to grow or for the audience to develop any attachment. It’s as if the script just assumes familiarity with them, all while changing their OEM load-out through questionable casting choices we’ll get on to shortly.

The game’s style is more cartoonish, relying on a cel-shaded art style that feels like a comic book brought to life. This isn’t just a stylistic choice; it makes it easier to accept the off-the-chain scenarios, like giant monsters, oversized weapons, and neon explosions, without breaking immersion. Translating to live action was always going to be a big ask, but rather than leaning into the stylised game world the movie reaches for a standard issue, CGI-heavy approach. The movie’s overall over-the-top presentation and tone often clashes with the attempt to ground certain emotional beats or character development. Video game humour, or any humour relying in interactivity, doesn’t work when you remove agency.

To draw another parallel to Boll, his films like Postal (scoring a mighty 3.5/10) were utterly chaotic, but there was a twisted charm in their madness. At least Boll knew his movies were campy disasters. Borderlands tries to control chaos without really understanding its value or how to direct it, resulting in a mess that feels rudderless.

The Death of a Thousand Cuts

While Pitchford’s influence might have contributed to Borderlands’ disaster, this circus wasn’t created by one person alone. No, it took a whole crew to turn this film into a dumpster fire, and they had plenty of time to make sure it burned super bright. Let’s run through the list.

1. How about starting with the writers? In 2016, Aaron Berg did an R-rated take on the script. Oren Uziel took over the torch from Berg in 2018. By 2020, Eli Roth was the attached director, with a screenplay by Craig Mazin. By 2021, Mazin’s script had been rewritten by Juel Taylor and Tony Rettenmaier, then again by Roth. That’s, what, six writers? It’s rare you see someone want to take themselves out of the credits of a major production, but that’s what happened with Craig Mazin. His name has been replaced by Joe Crombie, although Mazin denies Crombie is his pseudonym, so I don’t know what’s going on there.
2. Then, we’ve got shifting directors. While credited as the main man at the helm, Eli Roth was supported during reshoots by Deadpool director Tim Miller. Those who were watching along at home remember the terrible pain we felt when Zach Snyder stepped away from Justice League and handed the reins to Joss Whedon. It’s not so much whether a director is good or bad; it’s that they’re different people, and this tonal shift can be jarring, no matter how respectful the stand-in is trying to be. What’s slightly more painful is that another writer joined here, because Zak Olkewicz wrote new pages for Miller.
3. Third, there’s the confluence of a pandemic. Delivering any major project during that time was a ball ache, and Roth has mentioned the difficulties of filming during this time. 

To recap: we’ve got shifting directors, rewrites, reshoots, and the pandemic delays. Each change chipped away at what might’ve been a more cohesive film.

Say what you will about Uwe Boll, but his productions had a certain brutal efficiency—he got in, made the movie, and didn’t look back. A Boll Borderlands might’ve been worse in execution, but at least it wouldn’t have been dragged down by years of indecision and rewrites. He made bad movies quickly, which has its own strange allure.

Did Someone Drop Their Star?

There are some great actors in Borderlands. I love both Cate Blanchett and Kevin Hart. These two are titans of their craft, but you can’t make a square peg go into a round hole.

1. Let’s start with Hart. His manic intensity is superb. He has comedic timing, and a charm that vibrates off the screen. Which makes it an odd choice to put him in the shoes of the game’s Roland, a fairly straight-laced character who is so at odds with what you’d get Hart in for I can’t really fathom how we got here. He looked so bored playing the part I half-expected him to start scrolling Instagram mid-scene, totally lacking his usual energy. Hart was forced into a flat role, leading to a dull portrayal of a character that needed more depth and charisma to shine on screen.
2. Then there’s Blanchett. We know she can do crazy intensity from her time as Hela on Thor: Ragnarok. She can do calm and wise from her time as Galadriel in the Rings movies. Arguably her breakout role was as the titular Elizabeth in the 1998 movie, where she went through the most amazing character renovation in a single movie. We love Cate and her range, which is why I don’t think I’d waste that talent on the movie’s one-note take on Lilith. While she is capable of elevating nearly any role, in Borderlands she tries too hard to fit into the over-the-top, edgy nature of the character rather than simply embodying her. This misstep made her performance feel awkward and out of place. In a movie where crazy is king, Cate’s Lilith felt like she was politely waiting for her tea to steep.

I can’t imagine how difficult it would have been for either of these actors to play consistent characters over the changes to script and directors. The one bright spot was Jack Black as Claptrap. While I am not a fan of Claptrap in the games, Black’s natural energy matched the vibe of the games perfectly, arguably creating a new baseline for the game writers to follow in future sequels. But one match in a sea of mismatch can’t fix a movie. When the star power is misplaced, it’s difficult for a film to connect. 

We can’t move away from actors just yet. Jamie Lee Curtis joined the film to play Tanis, but at no point did I feel she embodied the game’s character voice. Instead, she seemed to be inserted to provide an explanation for people who’d fallen asleep at points to catch them up. There is a comically bad example of this right at the end where Curtis is expected to pull of a stone cold moment of exposition about a major beat you absolutely couldn’t have missed, right in the middle of a climactic dramatic and action scene.

Uwe Boll had a huge advantage here. He simply never had this problem, because his actors knew they were in a chaotic mess from the get-go and just went for it. There was no need to carefully balance their performances because chaos was the point.

A Nostalgic Look at the Chaos of Boll

Boll’s absurd legacy is that his films have become infamous for their sheer audacity, despite him reacting negatively to this criticism. Over time, we’ve learned to appreciate them, and not just because he challenged critics to boxing matches, if only because they never pretended to be anything other than what they were: trashy, insane, and oddly entertaining. And Boll wasn’t all train-wreck, all the time. Some of his earlier works like Rampage got marginally better reviews, landing a 6.2/10, so he’s not just stuck with infamy.

While Boll’s movies were often objectively worse in terms of production value, some succeeded in being fun in ways that Borderlands just didn’t. Boll embraced chaos, and was arguably a champion of it, while Borderlands tried too hard to package it into something neat. Boll also understood he made cheap movies quickly. He wasn’t trying for triple-A. And so when you got Jason Statham, John Rhys-Davies, Ray Liotta, Ron Pearlman, and Kristanna Loken in The Name of the King, you weren’t expecting them to be at their triple-A best. You were there to see the most ridiculous low-budget take on Dungeon Siege there could be, and by God did that movie earn its 3.8/10 stars.

It’s this misunderstanding that’s at the heart of Borderland’s failure. The chaotic agency the games provided leaves me feeling the movie’s flaws the most. It tried to adapt a game to a movie, without understanding what its source material or its audience were after. And while Boll’s special effects were low budget and trashy, Borderlands special effects were high budget and still trashy. It seems weird to say it, but the movie didn’t channel the spirit of the games. It wasn’t a good movie with great acting and special effects with a brilliant story. It wasn’t a good adaptation of a game. It missed both sides of the aisle, leaving an empty experience, and a feeling of ennui at the waste of human potential.

Boll wouldn’t have hesitated. He’d have picked a side, smashed the grape, and thrown it in your face for good measure. Borderlands? It took too long deciding whether to be a grape or a glass of fine wine, and in the end, we all got piss in our mouths. Or, I guess the correct ending of that metaphor would be ‘squished’.

So, What?

While it’s a stretch to say we miss Uwe Boll, he might have been the better fit for a Borderlands movie. In Boll’s world, there’s no middle of the road—just glorious, trashy extremes. If Uwe were the sensei, he’d have committed hard to the chaotic side of the road. Hell, he probably would’ve flipped the whole road upside down. His reckless, unapologetic filmmaking style could have embraced the chaotic energy of the game, instead of trying to tame it. He certainly would have got the movie delivered for a lot less than $145M, arguably at a budget that would have seen a sliver of profit. And in that sense, Boll might have done what Roth and Pitchford couldn’t. A campy flick that wasn’t a masterpiece, but that you also didn’t expect excellence from.

Uwe Boll never promised perfection, but at least he never tried to be something he wasn’t. Borderlands? It aimed for blockbuster brilliance but landed somewhere between a bad trip and a mid-2000s Xbox cutscene. Boll may have been the chaos we didn’t ask for, but maybe, just maybe, he was the chaos we needed. If Boll had directed Borderlands, we’d have at least known the nightmarish cyclone of low-budget mayhem and bizarre casting choices was intentional. And with Borderlands at 4.6/10 on IMDB, it’s hard to make a case that Boll would have made it worse.

See, sometimes what you need isn’t perfection but a raw, unfiltered mess that somehow captures the spirit of the original. Or, maybe you need perfection. But you need to choose. Remember Mr. Miyagi? “Walk right side, safe. Walk left side, safe. Walk middle, sooner or later, get squish, just like grape.” Borderlands tried to be both a gritty, high-budget action flick and a wacky, game-inspired comedy—and didn’t stick the landing on either. Boll might have swung for the fences and missed, but at least he’d have had the sense to pick a lane and stick to it. And Borderlands failed to be a bad cheap movie or a good expensive one. It squished, right in the middle, because it was a bad expensive movie.