Borderlands

The definitive worst film of Roth's career and another strike against AAA games brought to the big screen.

Since the characters remain one-dimensional -- not much more than cartoonish gamer avatars -- we're never terribly invested in their survival, or their quest to get to the vault first.

When done right, such biting self-parody can serve to excuse tired storytelling. Alas, Borderlands arrives so close on the heels of Deadpool & Wolverine that it feels like a belly flop to that film's cannonball.

So drearily routine and slapdash that even an A.I. would deem it too plagiaristic.

Like the original first-person shooter game, "Borderlands" is set on a junkyard planet named Pandora that was once a home base for an advanced alien species, but has since been overrun by violent marauders and women with formidable push-up bras.

"Borderlands" trudges through its treasure hunt scenario and endless ripoffs of better franchises from "Lethal Weapon" to "Star Wars." It makes you want to go home and blow up your Playstation.

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.

It's 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.

The film makes mind-boggling choices for an adaptation of a game series so inseparable from its obnoxiously rough-and-tumble tone, characters, and humor.

The choppy action scenes and the wan, lifeless incorporation of the film's settings and backgrounds with the characters' movements smack of postproduction shenanigans more than they do of on-set incompetence...

There's hardly any character development or dramatic peaks and valleys in "Borderlands" to hold the viewer's interest, even for such a brief runtime.

The tone of the movie is all over the map, which leaves much of the cast painting expressions on their faces that are a cross between stoic frustration and subtle confusion.

Nothing that works about the games has been adapted intact in this ugly, boring, truly inept piece of filmmaking.

An insipid mishmash of trite genre tropes, "Borderlands" is devoid of any real edge.

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.

A truly elaborate production design in which real sets are seamlessly combined with digital effects, something that does not necessarily happen in the industry's blockbusters. [Full review in Spanish]

A video game adaptation that completely misses the mark.

There just is no story to talk about in Borderlands!

This is the worst movie I have seen in years. Lots of top talent looking very uncomfortable. I'm assuming they didn't read the script before signing on for this mess.

There's a lot of talent in this, but it's all in the service of a cacophonous crash-and-bang not-terribly-interesting CGI'd hyper violent movie.