Eli Roth's Borderlands movie secures a very weird PG-13 rating

A consistently M-rated video game series has now been boiled down to Eli Roth's teen-friendly film

By William Hughes  |  June 21, 2024 | 9:23pm
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Eli Roth's Borderlands movie secures a very weird PG-13 rating
Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu, and Jamie Lee Curtis in Borderlands Photo: Katalin Vermes for Lionsgate

If we’re being honest, we’ve been looking askance at Eli Roth’s Borderlands movie for like half a decade at this point: The very popular Borderlands games are, from a tone perspective, some of the weirdest (and frequently, and deliberately, most annoying) games in the world of big-budget shooters: Sci-fi adventures that pride themselves on also being incredibly vulgar and comedy-forward alongside all the chaos. (The one bit everybody remembers from the start of Borderlands 2, for instance, is when the game’s Big Bad phones you up to tell you he’s bought himself a living diamond pony, and he’s named it after you: “Butt Stallion.”)

Borderlands (2024) Official Trailer – Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black

All of which was going to be really, really hard for Roth to translate into a movie—something that sort of bore out in the trailers for the film, which showed Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ariana Greenblatt, and especially Jack Black (as the voice of deliberately irritating robot Claptrap) all mugging like crazy to try to convince you how much fun they’re having, but in a not-too-vile kind of way. Hopes that Roth was hiding the really gnarly stuff for a red-band trailer have now been dashed, though, as the film received a genuinely unexpected rating from the MPAA this week: PG-13.

Given that every single Borderlands game (rated by the ESRB, which handles the medium) has been rated M (for ages 17 and up), that’s a pretty interesting divergence from the film’s source material. The MPAA notes that the film received its teenager-friendly rating for “intense sequences of violence and action, language and some suggestive material.” By comparison, the original Borderlands was dinged for “Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Mature Humor, Strong Language.” (The sequel added in “Sexual Language” and “Use Of Alcohol.”)

And, look, we get it: If you’re making a film that’s kind of fundamentally juvenile, you want to make sure that actual juveniles can go see it. (Games have an easier time of this; nobody’s getting carded on the PSN storefront, unless your parents are narcs who have the parental tools turned up, perhaps. Sorry, narc-kids.) But it’s still going to make Borderlands, which has tried very hard to visually emulate Gearbox Software’s games, read as a little… different from those same titles. We’ll have to wait until August 9 to see if the decision paid off.

 
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