The recent run of crowd-pleasing video game adaptations has come to an end. And then some.
Based on Gearbox Software’s video game series of the same name, Eli Roth’s new movie Borderlands is getting brutal reviews. “This sci-fi gobbler mixes inept directing, terrible writing, indifferent acting and gawdawful CGI into such stupefying boredom, it feels like nothing could top it for badness,” the Toronto Star critic Peter Howell wrote, while Rolling Stone‘s David Fear called it “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.”
Borderlands, which has an overqualified cast including Jack Black, Jamie Lee Curtis, Édgar Ramírez, Gina Gershon, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu, and Lydia Tár, answers the question no one was asking: what if Guardians of the Galaxy was bad?
But is Borderlands the worst-reviewed movie of the year?
Bored-erlands, as Norm Macdonald would have called it, currently has a 7 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Among 2024 films with at least 50 reviews, that puts it lower than stinkers like Unfrosted (42 percent), Argylle (33 percent), The Exorcism (27 percent), Harold and the Purple Crayon (27 percent), The American Society of Magical Negroes (26 percent), Night Swim (20 percent), Atlas (19 percent), Tarot (18 percent), Rebel Moon: Part Two – The Scargiver (17 percent), and, yes, even Madame Web (11 percent). Borderlands has an equally abysmal Metacritic score of 29, but hey, that’s three points higher than Madame Web! Take a win where you can get it.
Still, it’s safe to call Borderlands the worst-reviewed movie of the year.