Dear Cate Blanchett,

Cate. Can I call you Cate? I’ve just come from seeing your newest film, Borderlands, based on the Gearbox-produced video game franchise of the same name and I just felt like I should reach out to ask…

Are you OK?

I ask because after watching the film, I’m concerned. You looked exhausted throughout the entire production. Not in that insulting, “oh you look tired” condescending fashion that lousy coworkers say to you, but rather in that existential, where-did-I-go-wrong sense. Like you had gone for a barefoot walk in the garden and stepped in dogshit that was filled with thumbtacks and had to limp all the way back. I suppose I can’t blame you – you’ve had some fun with genre films like the Lord of the Rings films and Thor: Ragnarök, and Borderlands is directed by Eli Roth, a contentious if not popular director.

But Cate. There was so much wrong here. Did … did you not get a script beforehand? Was there a script? Because it felt like they just took the plot of the Borderlands 2 (group of misfits seeks magical unopenable vault on the planet Pandora, uses a bunch of wacky guns, an ally who is actually the daughter of the villain, etc.) and ripped out a few pages and then let a room full of monkeys write the replacements. So instead of one of the best, most charismatic video game villains ever (Handsome Jack), we were given a dreadfully dull performance by Edgar Ramirez as Atlas, the head of a weapons conglomerate. And instead of Angel, a mysterious voice leading us to the Vault, we’re given Ariana Greenblatt as Tina, a character who is, yes, super fun in the games but is not anyone’s famous daughter and certainly not the bizarre, clone-chosen one red herring that the movie has. Sure, Florian Munteanu was great as the younger Drago in Creed 2, but here he’s just a body behind a mask, with dialogue that isn’t even close to as fun as that of his character, Krieg, in the game.

Jamie Lee Curtis is in this! Was that part of the draw? Because in all honesty, she seems like the only one who’s trying, albeit not very hard. I mean, I’d like to say that Kevin Hart (woefully miscast as the stern and capable Roland) is trying hard, but is he? It feels like he’s just Kevin Hart-ing all over the place, just like Jack Black is Jack Black-ing everywhere as the voice of the robot Claptrap. In Black’s defense, he’s probably the highlight of the film. In Hart’s defense … I got nothin’.

Cate, dearest, you know we adore you and would forgive many things from you. Yet this pill is so much more bitter. The story is a mess, Cate, so bad and so bland that it couldn’t even be saved by great special effects. Not that that’s an issue, since the choppy, poorly edited, poorly visualized effects feel like someone dumped paint on a junkyard and fed footage of it through an Apple iie. Not to mention boring. My god, Cate, the action is so boring. What happened? Did you, at any point, tell Eli, “Hey, let’s maybe make it look like we’re not in these gunfights right after a good nap?” You’ve got clout, Ms. Blanchett! Use it to make lemonade out of this bucket of fetid lemons. Even the soundtrack — a high point of the games — was dreary and forgettable. They somehow managed to make Chaka Khan boring, Cate! How? HOW?!

Borderlands is dying a not-very-slow death at the box office, and while I hate to see you fail, neither of us is surprised, right? You must have known shortly after starting that this thing was going to get killed at the box office. Video games are hard enough to adapt as is! This isn’t just a bad video game adaptation. It’s a bad movie, full-stop. I don’t know that there’s a director alive who could have saved this malodorous ode to poor dialogue, pacing, and action. Please understand that all of this comes from a place of love, Cate. We hate to see the ones we love stuck in such a mess. Yet there is one positive note that I will leave you with, one slight glimmer of hope in this otherwise hopeless morass of suck.