BORDERLANDS ★★

(M) 101 minutes, cinemas

Limping into cinemas years after it was shot, Eli Roth’s sci-fi adventure-comedy Borderlands has the aura of a predestined loser. The plot, loosely founded on a video game of the same name, is as hokey as hokum gets: a tough bounty hunter (Cate Blanchett) racing over the surface of a despoiled planet to rescue a young girl (Ariana Greenblatt from Barbie) who’s said to be the Chosen One.

Why anyone thought Blanchett’s involvement would help bring in the target demographic is a bit of a mystery: certainly there’s not much here for Tar or Carol fans. But the choice is of a piece with the general approach to casting, which has resulted in the kind of random “all-star” line-up more commonly assembled for a Dreamworks animated spectacular.

Jack Black, the Kung Fu Panda himself, supplies the voice of a wisecracking robot named Claptrap, who looks like a wheelie bin, sounds like a 1940s radio comic and annoys the bejesus out of everybody (our knowing that he’s being awful on purpose doesn’t make him any funnier).

As one of Blanchett’s rivals in the mercenary game, Kevin Hart seems determined not to be the comic relief, which doesn’t give him space to make much of an impression of any sort. Elsewhere, we have Edgar Ramirez as the smooth corporate villain, Gina Gershon as a kind of intergalactic burlesque queen, and Jamie Lee Curtis as a snippy scientist who shows up halfway through for exposition purposes.

There’s also a hulking but ultimately good-hearted psycho in a hockey mask (Florian Munteanu), who mostly grunts, and who never becomes memorable or distinctive in any way. At first, I assumed he was included as a nod to Roth’s background as a director of gruesome horror movies, but it turns out similar figures loom large in the original games, which does raise the question of why Roth was hired in the first place, and whether the producers originally planned on a more brutal, rambunctious approach.

Adding to the puzzle are reports of reshoots without Roth’s involvement (the first act relies heavily on voiceover, a common sign of trouble). Whatever really happened behind the scenes, the final product is more or less kid-friendly, despite a lot of breezy murdering and an underlying sourness.