Trailer dropped today. Do we care? It looks bad. Real bad. -Cate Blanchett is 54 years old, a 54 year old actor probably shouldn't be anchoring a brand new action franchise. And she doesn't give off a Lilith vibe at all. Lilith always felt working class to me. -Kevin Hart, industry plant. Nothing about him gives off Roland vibes. -No Brick, no Mordecai? They couldn't get Dwayne Johnson to play Brick? Kevin Hart was already on set, how much more would it have taken? -Tiny Tina seems insufficiently tiny, insufficiently crazy, and insufficiently badass. -Krieg feels like the sort of character you save for the sequel, after everyone knows what a psycho is. -Jack Black as Claptrap? No, insufficiently annoying. Claptraps voice should make you want to install a face on Claptrap just so you can punch it. -Jamie Lee Curtis as Tannis? I guess, but it makes more sense to have Cate Blanchett be Tannis after giving her several red bulls. -Gina Gershon as Moxxi? 10/10, no notes. -The actress they hired for Ellie is insufficiently fat. It should be Fortune Feimster in a fat suit. Possibly two fat suits.
So guardians of the galaxy/suicide squad for the Tweeny crowd? Glad to see them getting one for them rather than another MCU or DCU one of these. Time to move on from comic books to modern video game crowd. I would give it a shot, but for some reason Kevin Hart can't Kevin Hart enough to be the comic lead in a movie. How the fuck do you fuck up your own schtick so well?
Well that's the thing, the character he's playing is traditionally the straight man to the weirdos on the team and the even weirder NPCs. He's not supposed to be funny. That's why it's especially jarring. Karen Gillan should be Lilith. She can play magical yet trashy, and she's already got the hair.
That’s the lady from Jumanji? Yeah, she’d definitely fit Lilith better. It’s like they let the middle aged game developers that made Borderlands cast this movie. That’s a real miss, IMHO, but like I said, I feel like the trailer was funny and it felt like Pandora so I’ll check it out.
I agree the look of everything else is excellent, there's a lot of potential there with a better cast. If they do a sequel that follows the plot of the second game it could be amazing.
My gamer son basically hates most if not all of the casting. From what I know I agree that the older actors are a bad choice, and I have a low tolerance for Hart even when he's right for the part which pretty much everyone but the movie's producers agree he's not. They did hit me in a soft spot by using an ELO song for the trailer so I'm not as hostile as I probably should be.
I for one like different interpretations of characters and storylines. If you want to see the same people, just stop moaning and play the fucking game, fer crissakes.
You can get a different take on a character without casting fucking Kevin Hart (I have no attachment to the game, I've never played it. I just like what I've seen in mostly cut scenes from Tina and Claptrap)
Why bother "adapting" anything if you're going to disregard the source material to this extent? I'm not opposed to any change at all, but the main two things Borderlands has going for it are the unique visuals and the memorable over the top characters. It looks like the producers went all-in on the visuals, but cut out all the character stuff. It's a trend I despise.
I would risk this for a female oriented action comedy with JLC, Cate blanchet, and not harley quin bunny girl. But then you toss in Kevin Hart as the male action lead, Jack Black's voice, and what seems to be some dumb ass fart jokes and I am not seeing that for some video game references I am not going to get. Could we just cut the male cast out and do a Birds of Prey 2 with the two older female stars and get Margo Robbie in there? You could put bunny girl in there too.
I'm seeing it in 8 minutes, I had a free pass and I'm a little tipsy, so hopefully it's at least a memorable shitshow. Do I want a Claptrap popcorn bucket? It doesn't look especially fuckable.
It was.... bad. -If they filed the serial numbers off and sold it as a generic sci-fi movie, it would be 40% better. As such, it fails to respect the source material, and the ways that it diverges from the source material don't improve the story. -There's a misdirection halfway through where, even if you're completely unfamiliar with the franchise, you can tell is an obvious misdirection. Like painfully so. -Kevin Hart was actually a lot better than I expected. He played the role a lot straighter that you'd think. -Krieg was wasted. He was just Tiny Tina's bodyguard, it could have just as easily been Brick. And at no point does he refer to his other job. Remember Bane in Batman & Robin? That's how badly they wasted Krieg. -Tiny Tina was also wasted. She wasn't even tiny. The one in-character line she had went over like a lead balloon. Should have been Angel. The plot would make so much more sense if she was Angel. -Janina Gavankar was also criminally wasted. Let her be weird! -Jamie Lee Curtis was also mostly wasted, despite being perfect casting. Let her be weird too! She's a natural weird, that's why she's the perfect Tannis. -It's like every cast member was directed to underplay their characters. Fine for some, crippling for others. -Cate Blanchett is old, man. Lilith was 22 in the first game and 27 in the sequel. Blanchett is 55 and it shows. It's bad. -The ending is a huge anticlimax. Nothing ends up mattering. There's no hook for a sequel. There's an homage to Hostel, but that's about it.
I love the games the OG trilogy were each great games, i have put a great deal of hours into each one. But in my experience everytime a movie or TV show is made around a game franchise i love it hardly ever lives up to my expectations likely due to how highly i care for said franchise, its doomed out of the gate. The only one i can think of off the top of my head was a couple of the CGI Resident Evils(Degeneration and Damnation and even i imagine most other people thought they sucked but i have a soft spot for them) and the show they did called Infinite Darkness(i was really hoping for a second season of that) every single one of the Live action films they did all 6 or 7 of them sucked a bag of dicks and i am admittedly a total mark for the whole franchise. But all the other things i can think of fell terribly flat for me personally, Witcher, Fallout, Mortal Kombat, Doom, Sonic, FNAF the list goes on and on all trash money grabs. I'll watch it but im less than hopeful to say the least.
It's on Starz right now. I never played the games, but as its own movie, I like it okay. It's a dumb SF comedy, like the comedy parts of Heavy Metal. If they sold this as live-action Heavy Metal 3, it would have been received better. I certainly like it better than Heavy Metal 2, which I don't hate, but I'm not a fan of. You could do worse. Like Phantom Menace. Or Battlefield Earth.
