Photo: supplied
My introduction to the film Borderlands - based on a popular video game - was a trailer that promised - well, promised more than your standard, low-rent Lara Croft Tomb Raider knock-off.
Apart from anything else, look who's in it!
From the enjoyable Jumanji films - comedian Kevin Hart and Jack Black. From her Oscar winning performance in Everything Everywhere All At Once - Jamie Lee Curtis. Even spunky kid Ariana Greenblatt was pretty good in Barbie.
But mainly - what on God's green Earth is Cate Blanchett doing in this?
Everyone else at least has some B-movie credentials going into this most B of B-movies. But Blanchett - Galadriel in Lord of the Rings or no Galadriel - is irredeemably A-List only.
She's been nominated for eight Oscars and won two, for goodness's sake!
Can we assume the Blanchett-enriched version of Borderlands is going to be something special?
Our first hint that this might not be the case is the presence of horror director Eli Roth behind the camera.
In person Roth is an affable, cheerful chap who likes nothing more than scaring the bejeepers out of his audiences.
Apparently, he wanted to do the same thing here, despite the instructions of producers Ari and Avi Arad to keep it mild and M-rated.
The result required weeks of subsequent re-shoots, I gather, culminating in incoherence beyond the dreams of the usually fairly slapdash Roth.
As a tribute to the professionalism of all these Hollywood insiders, when Borderline finally reached cinemas it achieved the extremely rare "zero percent" on the Rotten Tomatoes website.
I assume that this fiery hostility came mostly from fans of the game Borderlands.
I doubt if Blanchett's crowd bothered to go to it, tolerantly pointing out that woman doesn't live on Oscar-nominated art-films alone, and those swimming-pool repairs or whatever don't pay for themselves.
And is it really as bad as that? Are there depths of character that the video crowd is missing? And is there plenty to enjoy as these top performers play with the material offered?
The answers, in order, are yes it really is; no there are no depths of anything, and I see no evidence of anyone enjoying themselves in any way.
The story involves a hard-bitten bounty-hunter - guess who? - hired to find a kid called Tiny Tina on a planet called Pandora.
Pandora may be 50 light years away, but she gets there in the blink of an eye.
This is a hint of how stupid things are going to get later on.
Speaking of which, she then meets the most annoying character in the film - a robot called Claptrap, voiced by an unhinged Jack Black after about 20 cups of coffee.
They eventually find Tiny Tina, also Kevin Hart as Roland the Soldier, Jamie Lee Curtis as a friend of Blanchett's mother, another slumming actress, Gina Gershon, playing a sort of burlesque madam…. but I sense you're not really interested.
In this you echo Blanchett, whose face throughout Borderlands reflects the bored misery of someone who realises she's been lied to by her agent.
"It'll be a hoot, Cate. You know you've always told me you want to do comedy. Your stunt team will do most of the work anyway. Think a sort of cross between Barbie and Deadpool..."
The key phrase being "sort of" of course. There's a fine, but very clear, line between popular, campy fun and awful, zero percent on Rotten Tomatoes. And the trouble is, you don't know which side of the line it is until you're doing it.
Sadly, anyone looking at the poster for Borderlands probably has a pretty good idea.
