The reviews for Eli Roth’s Borderlands adaptation are in, and surprise! It’s no good.
Initially announced back in 2015, the Borderlands film has been through a few different revisions and a couple of delays during its nine years in production.
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Leigh Whannell, the writer of the original Saw and all three Insidious films (as well as director on two criminally overlooked films, Upgrade and 2020’s The Invisible Man), was originally attached to both write and direct the film until he was unceremoniously dropped somewhere along the way.
It also seems that Craig Mazin, now best known for his work on the award-winning TV show Chernobyl and the extremely well-received adaptation of The Last of Us, was also set to write Borderlands’ screenplay at some point during pre-production, but is uncredited in its final release (seemingly because he requested that his name be removed).
Finally, back in January last year, the film went through some pretty extensive reshoots. The reshoots were helmed by Deadpool director Tim Miller, as Eli Roth was halfway through shooting the film Thanksgiving.
As a result of all these production issues, paired with the negative response to the pre-release images and the casting announcements, the internet assumed that the movie was going to be a stinker… and according to basically every review so far, the internet was correct in said assumption.
Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey started off strong in her one-out-of-five star review, stating that “Borderlands is a disaster” and blamed “wildly miscast actors and an impenetrable script” for its terrible score.
Empire’s Dan Jolin was ever so slightly nicer in his two-outta-five review, calling it a “sloppy assembled” movie and referring to it as “a botched Guardians wannabe that isn’t half as fun as you’d hope from the punky sci-fi promise”.
I’ll be honest, I spent a long time hunting down a review that wasn’t completely negative and the best I could find is this one from Jakarta Globe’s Jayanty Nada Shofa that described it as “Just alright”.
Glowing praise. I wonder if they’ll put that quote on the poster?
Topics: TV And Film, Borderlands