‘Borderline’ demolishes the boundaries of decorum
I’ve subjected myself to some bad movies over the years, but I can’t recall one as irredeemably awful as the Margot Robbie-produced “Borderline.” A 1990s-set stalker “comedy” marking the inauspicious directorial debut of “Cocaine Bear” writer Jimmy Warden, it stars Jack Nicholson’s son, Ray, as a psychotic filled with grandiose delusions of wedding a blonde pop star – at gunpoint.
She’s portrayed by Warden’s wife, Samara Weaving, a not-ready-for-prime-time actress with middling appeal and no grasp of how to make her Britney Spears-ish Sofia the slightest bit sympathetic. It’s pretty much the same story for her castmates, with the possible exception of Jimmie Fails as Sofia’s latest boy-toy, a Dennis Rodman-like NBA star with more brawn than brains.
Good thing, too, because he’s about to take a serious licking, getting smacked upside the head, first by a solid-body electric guitar and later, a baseball bat swung by the young female accomplice of Nicholson’s dapper and deranged Paul Duerson. Why the petite French woman named Penny Pascal (Alba Baptista) is abetting Paul is unclear, but she’ll do anything to please him, including being toasted like a marshmallow in Sofia’s in-home recording booth.
Like most of Baptista’s castmates, she’s an expendable cog in an unoiled machine that has zero idea about its desired objective. It’s just gratuitous violence for the sake of being gratuitous. It’s also stupid to the max, with a script by Warden you’d swear he penned as shooting moved along. That might explain why none of it makes a lick of sense.
Told largely in flashback, “Borderline” – the title unabashedly pinched from the Madonna hit – begins where it ends, with Paul dressed in a tux, standing at the altar, eager to say his “I do’s.” Joltingly, we then zip back a few weeks to the night Paul showed up unannounced at Sofia’s L.A. mansion, eager to present her with a red rose.
There, he’s met by Sofia’s bodyguard, Bell (former “Grey’s Anatomy” hunk Eric Dane), who seems to have learned how to manage Paul through past encounters, thus shooing him away with little ado. But moments later, Paul returns holding a knife to his throat and threatening to do himself in. Bell talks him out of it, but at a cost.
Oddly, Warden endeavors to play these encounters for laughs, as if mental illness and suicide are ideal fodder for comedy. Certainly not the way he attempts to depict them. It doesn’t help that Nicholson, lacking his father’s talent and charisma, goes overboard selling Paul’s insanity. But wait, it gets much worse when Paul and Penny, aided by the beefy J.H. (ex-pro wrestler Patrick Cox), escape from a mental hospital armed with an elaborate scheme to storm Sofie’s estate and stage their version of a shotgun wedding. What could go wrong?
Well, the preposterous yet highly predictable script for one thing. You can bill yourself as a comedic thriller, but saying so doesn’t make it true. “Borderline” is Exhibit A. You suspect Warden realized this halfway through filming and sought to compensate by going full-on bizarro – and more violent – in hopes we wouldn’t notice the idiocy of what he’s wrought. How crazy does it get? How about a scene in which Sofia and her captor, Penny, unite for an impromptu version of Céline Dion’s “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now,” capped off with the latter smacking her duet partner across the face with a tambourine?
They sing it so well that I suspect their voices were dubbed, but it’s still nice to listen to, mostly because it momentarily enlivens a story with zero pizzazz. Kudos, though, to Warden’s selection of notable hits from the 1990s for the soundtrack, including a somber cover of Madge’s “Borderline.” At least the tunes are great. As for the rest, save yourself a messy divorce and ditch this loser at the altar.
Movie review
Borderline
Rated: R for violence and language
Cast: Ray Nicholson, Samara Weaving, Eric Dane, Alba Baptista and Jimmy Fails
Director: Jimmy Warden
Writer: Jimmy Warden
Runtime: 94 minutes
Where: In theaters and on streaming March 14
Grade: F
