Borderlands review - 'sees Cate Blanchett doing her best Han Solo impression'

Kevin Hart as Roland, Jamie Lee Curtis as Tannis, Ariana Greenblatt as Tiny Tina, Florian Munteanu as Krieg, and Cate Blanchett as Lilith in Borderlands | Courtesy of Lionsgate

Borderlands (12A) **

Tuesday (15) **

It Ends With Us (15) ***

Shot back in 2021, delayed by Covid and now arriving in a summer where Furiosa has already flatlined at the box-office, Mad Max/Star Wars-influenced video game adaptation Borderlands doesn’t have much going for it beyond the limited appeal of seeing Cate Blanchett doing her best Han Solo impression. She plays Lilith, a flame-haired, gun-slinging, intergalactic bounty hunter corralled into returning to the home planet she abandoned as a child to track down the kidnapped daughter (Ariana Greenblatt) of a wealthy arms dealer (Edgar Ramírez).

Said kid - basically a sassy, 12A-appropriate version of Chloë Grace Moretz’s Hit Girl from Kickass - supposedly has “chosen one” credentials and may hold the key to opening a mythical vault thought to be hidden deep underground on Lilith’s toxic-waste-ridden homeland (the planet shares a name with Avatar’s Pandora, though the video game came out first). 

Along for the ride are Kevin Hart (as a conscientious soldier), Jamie Lee Curtis (as a mad archaeologist), and the voice of Jack Black as an irritating robot that seems to have been conceived as cross between C3PO, WALL-E and a failed stand-up who doesn’t realise he’s not funny.

The film has a similar problem. Director Eli Roth - in his first attempt at sci-fi - keeps things moving swiftly enough, but the banter is groan-worthy, the action is derivative and the whole enterprise never strives to do more than distract the bored 12-year-olds it seems to have been custom-designed for.

A film bursting with ideas, few of them good, Tuesday puts an oddball spin on the terminal illness weepy and comes up with something even harder to pull off: the quirky terminal illness weepy. Not that it starts off that way. Beginning more like a quasi horror movie, debut writer/director Daina O. Pusić initially impresses as she introduces us to none other than Death himself, who takes the unexpectedly Monty Python-esque form of a parrot, one whose headspace is a cacophony of cosmic yearning from soon-to-be cadavers. 

Flying around the world bringing an end to the suffering of imminent daisy pushers, Death (growlingly voiced by Arinzé Kene) soon arrives at the London door of the titular Tuesday (Lola Petticrew) and finds his ability to make the living ex-people temporarily halted when the reluctant-to-expire Tuesday distracts him with a rubbish joke. Tuesday has one of those non-specific, beatific terminal illnesses beloved of movies and, after managing to quiet the chaos in Death’s head, she convinces him to break with protocol and let her stay alive until her mother, Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), returns home from work.

At which point you might be asking yourself, what even is this film? Sadly it’s not as interesting as it sounds. Already playing roulette with a wealth of influences that run the gamut from the Greek Weird Wave and the early films of Michel Gondry (if we’re being generous) to egregiously whimsical studio/indie fare like The Book of Henry and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (if we’re not), it proceeds to take an even more left-field turn as Zora refuses to indulge in a tearful farewell, prompting Pusić to crowbar in a midpoint twist that will not be unfamiliar to fans of the Final Destination franchise.

Part of the problem, though, is that for all the film’s commendable efforts to craft an unconventional metaphor for bereavement, its random acts of weirdness (among them an unintentionally cringey use of Ice Cube’s irony drenched gangsta rap classic It Was a Good Day) are just that. They don’t connect in any profound way to the bigger ideas it’s trying to explore about the importance of honouring the dead by living well after they’re gone. That’s too bad because Louis-Dreyfus brings a pleasingly anarchic edge to her performance as a mother whose denial of her daughter’s condition has reached pathological proportions. Alas, botched practical effects and a mawkish ending eventually derail even her good work.

A straight-up weepy, romantic this time, but with some tougher themes underlying it, It Ends With Us transforms Colleen Hoover’s blockbuster novel of the same name (it’s sold more than four million copies) into a surprisingly robust relationship drama. It stars Blake Lively as Lily Bloom, a Boston florist with a sense of humour about her own nominative determinism. About to open her own flower shop, she randomly meets a handsome neurosurgeon called Ryle (played by the film’s director Justin Baldoni). Though they hit it off immediately, they also want slightly different things and Lily’s complex relationship with her recently deceased father (played in flashbacks by Kevin McKidd) is also making her take things slower than either would like. Nevertheless, the fact that she promptly - and unwittingly - befriends and hires Ryle’s sister (Jenny Slate) seems to further confirm that the universe is determined to push these two together. 

It Ends With Us | Nicole Rivelli

All of which sounds ridiculous, but the film manages to smooth out some of these hokier plot turns with flirty banter that has the added bonus of getting the audience to root for them (it helps too that Lively and Baldoni generate plenty of chemistry). Plot complications duly ensue when a long-lost figure from Lily’s past (played by Brandon Sklenar) re-enters her life just as some of the more unsavoury elements of said past start manifesting themselves in other ways. Here, the film teases out a darker story involving domestic abuse, but as a director Baldoni manages to deal with it sensitively while embracing the melodrama of it all.

Tuesday and It Ends with Us are in cinemas from 9 August; Borderlands is on general release from 8 August