Jack Black’s Latest Movie ‘Borderlands’ Ripped by Critics: ‘Definitely in Contention’ for Worst Movie of the Year

US actor Jack Black attends the "Borderlands" special Los Angeles fan event at T
VALERIE MACON/AFP via Getty Images
David Ng

Borderlands — Jack Black’s first movie since his Tenacious D  bandmate publicly wished for the assassination of former President Donald Trump — is receiving scathing reviews, with some critics calling it possibly the worst movie of the year.

One critic even singled out Jack Black for being “grating and unfunny.”

Set to open Friday in cinemas, Borderlands is an adaptation of the popular video game franchise of the same name, with horror auteur Eli Roth serving as director. Jack Black voices the character of Claptrap, the comic android whose presence was a staple in the video games. Also part of the ensemble cast are Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, and Jamie Lee Curtis.

As of Thursday, Borderlands had received an embarrassing Rotten Tomatoes score of just 3 percent, indicating almost unanimously bad reviews from professional film critics. Plagued with rumors of extensive reshoots and a ballooning budget north of $120 million, the movie is tracking to be one of the biggest box-office bombs in recent memory.

“Is Borderlands the worst film of the year? It’s definitely in contention — so laughably bad, in fact, that it feels like being catapulted back to a time when video game adaptations were a byword for mediocrity,” wrote a reviewer for the London Evening Standard.

The left-wing Daily Beast concluded the movie is “so drearily routine and slapdash that even an A.I. would deem it too plagiaristic.”

“[Jack] Black’s voice work is grating and unfunny, made worse by Claptrap’s insistence on bursting into song and dance,”  The Hollywood Reporter‘s critic wrote.

Indiewire concluded: “The definitive worst film of Roth’s career and another strike against AAA games brought to the big screen.”

Canada’s Globe and Mail reviewer wrote that Jack Black’s character “very quickly wears out his welcome.”

Just last month, Jack Black found himself fighting for his career after his Tenacious D bandmate Kyle Gass mocked Donald Trump just one day after the former president was struck by but survived an assassin’s bullet. During a performance in Australia, Gass shouted to the audience “don’t miss Trump next time.”

As condemnation poured in from all sides, Black shut down the international tour and put the band on hiatus. But this week, as he worked to promote Borderlands, he stated that he will bring Tenacious D back at an unspecified time in the future.

As Breitbart News reported, Jack Black was one of Hollywood’s most prominent celebrity fundraisers for Joe Biden, helping headline the starry June fundraiser featuring George Clooney and Julia Roberts.

At the time, none of the celebrities present said anything publicly about the president’s steep cognitive decline, which became too obvious to ignore shortly thereafter at the first presidential debate.

Follow David Ng on Twitter @HeyItsDavidNg. Have a tip? Contact me at dng@breitbart.com

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