Deadpool vs. Wolverine. Lilith soon finds Tina, but when Atlas’s goons arrive, she rescues Tina from them and soon throws in her lot with Roland. (Her sense of morality is merely slow developing, like the movie’s plot.)

Lilith’s “team,” besides Tina and Roland, includes a robot named Claptrap (voiced by Jack Black), which resembles WALL-E on one wheel if it had been left in a New Jersey landfill for a few decades. The group also has a giant Hulk named Krieg (Florian Munteanu), who sports a Jason Voorhees hockey mask and grunts a lot. And, since the movie needed someone to explain the ridiculously complicated backstory, they find Dr. Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), whose area of expertise is unknown, who provides the obligatory information dumps. Apparently, Pandora is the home of a vast repository of the accumulated wisdom and inventions of a futuristic alien species, and Tina is the key to unlocking the treasure vault.

Director Eli Roth and Joe Abercrombie wrote the screenplay for Borderlands. I credit them for choosing some quality works to rip off in this movie. The quest for the vault resembles Indiana Jones’s search for the Holy Grail, and Lilith’s team could be rejected applicants for the Guardians of the Galaxy. But there’s almost no sign in Borderlands of the distinct personalities and camaraderie that made the Guardians movies so enjoyable. You may begin by noting several roles are horribly miscast. When you think of tough, futuristic soldiers, Kevin Hart is probably the last name that comes to mind. To make matters worse, he isn’t given a single funny line or opportunity to ad-lib here.

The film’s few attempts at humor come from Jack Black as Claptrap. Black tries to be funny at every opportunity but is even less successful than Hart. Claptrap’s primary function in the movie is to be repeatedly mistreated physically (including being dropped into a seemingly bottomless well) in a way that would never be acceptable if done to a live character. Borderlands also turns Edgar Ramirez into a bland one-note villain and Jamie Lee Curtis into a mousy nerd.

Borderlands has lots of action, mainly featuring Lilith’s team blasting their way through legions of uniformed goons that seem to have wandered off a Star Wars set. However, few of these scenes are decently staged. The blame goes to Eli Roth, who is far better as a horror director than an action-helmer. He’s also burdened by the movie’s PG-13 rating. That eliminates any opportunities for Roth’s usual gore and the type of dialogue Hart and Black excel at. The lengthy production delays and rewrites while making the movie didn’t help. Filming began in 2021 (before Blanchett delivered her masterful performance in Tar) but didn’t wrap until sometime last year. The delay is most noticeable and distracting regarding Ariana Greenblatt, now 16. Her character is noticeably older in the opening scenes (which were reshot) than in later ones, making me wonder at first whether I had missed some vital plot point.

What little enjoyment there is in Borderlands is actually in the backstory. Gina Gershon has an entertaining but all-too-brief cameo as the madame of a Pandoran brothel with a history with Lilith. (This sequence rips off yet another far superior movie, Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall.) Also, the movie’s only actual humor is its use of the vault mystique as the basis for a fledgling tourist industry on Pandora, as tour busses drop off would-be treasure hunters in prime locations.

If I hadn’t known that Borderlands was based on a video game, I would have thought I had somehow stumbled onto a direct-to-streaming vehicle with an A-list cast. That cast is completely wasted in roles that will probably earn some performers Razzie nominations in months to come. Traditionally, major film studios have used August as a dumping ground for summer-style escapist releases that don’t work. In recent years, though, we’ve had some surprisingly successful late-summer releases, most notably the original Guardians of the Galaxy. Unfortunately, Borderlands has crossed the border into the typical August wasteland of terrible films.